via Working on reposted text.

If I like it enough, I may even retire this site completely (some DNS magic will definitely keep this address pointed at whichever site gets new content, guaranteed).

I’ve fallen out of the “long-format blog post” habit, seemingly preferring Twitter-style short-format updates. But maybe something like this (which also, incidentally, works on the iPad) might be just what I need.

I wonder if it’ll work on my Android tablet?

hmm. seems easy enough. now to find a way to not go pulling-out-my-hair crazy trying to reliably type on this horrible keyboard.

If you’ve already got telnet set up, and your config includes a line like

username admin password 123487123458134789561278561927845 level 15 encrypted

Then you’re already very close. Only two steps remain between you and SSH console access.

1. crypto key generate dsa (or rsa)
2. ip ssh server

That’s it! Don’t bother with the instructions that you might find in the user guide for “configuring an initial SSH console password” that have you mess with aaa authentication default line and the like. They’re red herrings.

I bought an Android phone last year. A T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which is a rebranded HTC Magic 32b. I like it a lot, even though about 2 months later the Nexus One was released. It’s become my primary pocket-based internet device; Heather inherited my old 1st-gen iPod Touch. Being the huge geek that I am, I’m surprised I waited the week that I did before I voided the warranty, got root, and installed a “mod”. Mostly because I could, but also partially to gain some performance and features that weren’t available on the stock ROM.

So let’s look at that. My phone came with Android 1.5 (Cupcake), but T-Mobile had already released the OTA (over-the-air) update to 1.6, so I never really experienced 1.5, which I hear is a good thing. 1.6 looks like this:

I used this version of Android (stock, with some rearranged icons) for about a week, and then I hacked my phone, and installed CyanogenMod 4.1.9999. That gave me root access, an easy-to run terminal emulator, and tethering (which I’ve used exactly once, to make sure it worked). I also called T-Mobile at some point and got the subsidy unlock code for my phone, so that I could use other providers’ SIM cards when I’m in T-Mobile dead zones. CyanogenMod, through 4.2.15.1 (the latest stable release as of today), looks virtually identical to “stock” 1.6. It’s got some neat features, like an improved dialer and lots of technology/backend ports from Eclair (Android 2.1). About a month (6 week, maybe?) ago, Cyanogen released a test version of CyanogenMod 5.0.7 for my phone, and I snapped it up. Early adoption of technology is definitely for me. 5.0.7 is a port of Eclair (Android 2.1) to the Dream and Sapphire hardware (those are the production names that HTC used for the G1 and MyTouch 3G). There’s stuff missing in this port from the full release of 2.1 that’s on the Nexus One or Droid (the 3d launcher is the most obvious, but there are others), but it’s very nearly feature-complete. And I think it’s good stuff. 5.0.7-test5 came out last night, and it’s the first -test version that I’ve run that I’ve not felt the need to enable swap space for. Things are snappy, I haven’t seen any bugs that aren’t already being worked on, and I get to use things like the official Twitter for Android app (which only works on 2.0+). By and large, though, the screen hasn’t changed all that much. Here’s what my current “home screen” looks like:

And really? It looks pretty much the same. I don’t go out of my way to make my phone flashy (although it’s definitely capable of that); I go for functional. I use everything on the home screen on a daily basis, and things launch nice and fast, operate as I expect, and then stay out of my way.

End result? If you have an older Android phone, like the T-Mobile G1 or the MyTouch 3G, and don’t mind voiding your warranty, think about moving to CyanogenMod. It’ll be worth your while, especially if you want to use new features (and not wait for an official 2.1 upgrade, which may never arrive).

Let’s say you have a tar archive, foo.tar.gz .  Let’s also say that this archive contains an upgraded version of a popular blogging software suite.  The contents of the archive look like this:

foo/index.php
foo/image.jpg
foo/css/web.css
foo/css/print.css

Let’s also suppose, shall we, that you’ve got the previous version of foo already installed in another location, like /var/www/foo.example.com/  , and you want to extract the contents of the archive (here’s the important part) into that directory, without having to move the directory contents or rename any directories, or whatnot.  Here’s how:

cd /var/www/foo.example.com && tar zxvp –strip-components=1 -f /path/to/foo.tar.gz

This will extract the archive, and ignore the first level of the path (in this case, foo/).

• A Camera. Stills is fine, video would be an added bonus.  The camera on my BlackBerry sucks big-time, and I’d like to take cute pictures of Nora without having to carry a 3rd piece of electronics around with me.
• Full Bluetooth support. I want to be able to sync with my MacBook over Bluetooth, I want to be able to use the Bluetooth speakers in my office (or Bluetooth headphones, if I ever buy any). I want full file-transfer abilities, too; not just the crappy “you can sync your calendar and contacts” that it has now.
• A good speaker (yes, I know that the 2nd-generation iPod Touch has a speaker; I don’t have one of those) with an independent software volume control for each of sound effects and music

I think that if Apple added all three of those features, I might downgrade my BlackBerry to “stick that makes phone calls”, and do all of the “funnest” stuff on the iPod.  Or if Apple gives up on the AT&T exclusivity for the iPhone, and lets T-Mobile sell them in the US, I’ll just trade both out for an iPhone 3GS.  But since I don’t see that happening any time soon, I’ll just have to continue hoping for upgrades instead….

She’s swaddled and sleeping right now (and boy am I envious).  Heather is pretty exhausted; I think once she gets out of the shower, she’s going to try to get some sleep (before she has to wake up for a feeding).  I’m running on new-father adrenaline and the fact that I finally ate something bigger than a breakfast taco for the first time in about 24 hours, but I suspect that in the very near future I’m going to crash and sleep for about a month.

I’m sure more pictures will surface once we dig out our digital camera cables and start the downloads And I’m similarly sure that I’ll be close to this tired for the next year or so; I’ve accepted that as one of the dangers of being a parent.

Now that the warning’s been issued:

I finally decided to take another swing at OpenID. Specifially, the WordPress OpenID plugin. It just wouldn’t work on this site (Dreamhost doesn’t have the GMP library installed, and the fallback method failed to work). This didn’t bother me in the past, but it finally got to the point (again) that it bothered me that it didn’t work. I think the last straw was when I tried to sign into filttr.com.  So Google to the rescue!

It took a while, but eventually I came across a blog post from someone with a Dreamhost account, who described how to compile a custom PHP5 with GMP support. And that article pointed to a page on a Dreamhost support wiki (imagine that) that had shell scripts which were supposed to handle most of the heavy lifting (compiling the dependencies first, for example).  Trouble is, I ran into a couple of problems with the automated scripts, so here are the changes that I made (which, incidentally, worked):

First, the scripts delete everything in ${INSTALLDIR} when they run. That means they also delete the GMP library that you may have just gone to the trouble of compiling and installing.  Three options here (I chose the 2nd):

1. Comment out the line that reads rm -rf ${INSTALLDIR}
2. Re-run the “make install” step of the GMP installation instructions, in another terminal, after the first script has started compiling something else. Just make sure you do this before PHP starts compiling.
3. Hack the scripts even more than you already have, and add in the step of compiling libGMP.

Next, cURL wouldn’t compile because of a shared-library error in libssl (from OpenSSL). The specific error was:

/usr/bin/ld: /home/HOMEDIR/php5/lib/libssl.a(s2_clnt.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/home/HOMEDIR/php5/lib/libssl.a: could not read symbols: Bad value

To fix that, I added “–shared” to the pre-compile config command for openssl; that ended up looking like

./config –shared –prefix=${HOME}/php5

after that, almost everything else compiled properly (although I had to compile OpenSSL twice, probably because I screwed up the source dir at some point during my first attempt; deleting the entire source dir and re-extracting everything let the compile succeed).

Except PHP, initially. PHP 5.2.6 is pretty old, and I neglected to update the version information in the download script (also, I think php.net may have changed their download process).  So I downloaded PHP 5.2.10 direct from php.net with wget, extracted it to the appropriate location, and updated the compile script to reference the new version.

Oh, and be sure to update ${DOMAIN} in that script as well; otherwise, the install portions at the very bottom won’t work quite right (or even at all). Also, note that at the bottom of that wiki page (below the “other alternate script”), there are some addenda that need to be added to your .htaccess file; don’t forget them if you plan on customizing your php.ini file.

Of course, there are drawbacks to having my own custom PHP5 installed. I’ll have to keep up with upgrades and security updates myself, and recompile whenever any changes happen. But I consider that a small price to pay to get what I wanted.