talmage - Slashdot User

Comment Mobile Emergency Communications Project (Score 4, Interesting) 102

by talmage on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @01:49PM (#42873185) Attached to: Connecting Android Phones Without Carrier Networks

I've organized a similar project, the Mobile Emergency Communications Project. It builds on NRL OLSR, NRL SMF, and NORM and comes with some rudimentary graphical applications for testing and for file sharing. The applications are written in C++ and QML using the Qt framework.

The project runs on Linux and on Nokia's N900 and N9 phones. I'm looking for help to port it to Symbian, Android, and iOS devices.

Comment Re:They might work for you (Score 1) 227

by talmage on Sunday July 22, 2012 @02:29PM (#40730887) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Stepping Down From an Office Server To NAS-Only?

I have two NASes, one at home and one off-site. I've recently learned that when a drive fails, in order to keep using your NAS, you have to have spare drives on hand. Even if you report the failed drive to the manufacturer immediately, it takes time for the new drive to arrive. In that time, your data is unprotected by the redundancy of RAID unless you have a spare drive to take the place of the failed one. Otherwise, it's best if you take the NAS offline or use it read-only.

In two months, I've had three drives fail under warranty. First, a pair fo them failed, then one of the replacements failed. In each case, because the failure happened mid-week, it took until the following week for the new drives to arrive from the manufacturer. In this period, I've been without the full use of my NAS for two weeks because I didn't have and wouldn't buy extra drives.

Comment It's easy with a Mac Mini (Score 2) 217

by talmage on Friday February 24, 2012 @02:56PM (#39150763) Attached to: The Best Streaming Media Player

I use a Mac Mini for my media player. I get some content using Miro (http://www.getmiro.com/). I play video content with either Miro or XBMC (http://xbmc.org/). For audio, I use Music Player Daemon (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki) and control it with my phone or a laptop. It just works.

Comment Re:ReadyNAS (Score 1) 251

by talmage on Monday September 12, 2011 @01:56PM (#37378746) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Network Backup Solution Out of the Box?

I use rsync between a pair of ReadyNAS NVXes. I make backups to the local one and let rsync take care of the rest. Not all of the ReadyNAS line supports rsync over SSH but this model does.

Comment Re:and what about N900? (Score 1) 148

by talmage on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @05:35PM (#37037618) Attached to: Nokia Killing Symbian and S40 In North America

I love my N900. It took me a while to understand that the N900 was never intended to be a phone for most users. It was a platform for hackers and early adopters to play with and teach Nokia about FOSS. I was plenty disappointed when I figured this out about Nokia. If Nokia had made it a product for consumers, I'd have bought one for my elderly father.

Comment multiple copies in multiple places (Score 1) 680

by talmage on Thursday January 20, 2011 @07:44PM (#34946602) Attached to: How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

FWIW, I use DigiKam to organize my pictures. It's nice. I keep the originals on my laptop. After I catalogue them with DigiKam, I copy them to the RAID on my network. Every night, the RAID rsyncs with another RAID that I keep at a friend's house. This gives me redundancy at home in case I delete a picture by mistake and an off-site backup in case of theft, fire, or flood. I use a pair of Netgear ReadyNAS NVXes.

Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday June 03, 2010 @01:07AM from the paging-doctor-manners dept.

Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"

Comment OSSIMPlanet + OMAR (Score 1) 190

by talmage on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @05:54PM (#31604336) Attached to: Open Source Alternative To Google Earth?

OSSIMPlanet is OSS and it talks to OGC-compliant servers. OMAR is a scalable OGC-compliant WMS. You can build your own Google Earth system with them.

See the OSSIM web site for OSSIM itself and OSSIMPlanet. OMAR is harder to find than OSSIMPlanet. Try here.

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @10:03PM from the non-obfuscated dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort 135

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 13, 2010 @09:37AM from the inspiration-comes-from-many-places dept.

holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."

JPL Background Check Case Reaches Supreme Court 112

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 13, 2010 @12:43AM from the faster-boys-if-you-want-your-pay dept.

Dthief writes "A long-running legal battle between the United States government and a group of 29 scientists and engineers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has now reached the US Supreme Court." At issue: mandatory background checks for scientists and engineers working at JPL, which they allege includes snooping into their sexual orientation, as well as their mental and physical health.

Comment Re:Depressing, but not uncommon (Score 1) 1251

by talmage on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @10:15AM (#28940621) Attached to: Student Sues University Because She's Unemployable

Oh, stop whining. You taught yourself how to program a computer in N languages. Now go teach yourself how to have a conversation in your native language. I taught myself. You can, too. It's just another skill. Bootstrap it and get on with your life.

Comment Re:Use the line to pull other lines into your outl (Score 1) 635

by talmage on Thursday June 04, 2009 @10:07AM (#28209021) Attached to: You've Dropped Your Landline — Now What?

I have one of those phones. It's beige. It has a rotary dial. It works just fine, thank you. I got it from a friend who bought three on EBay.

If you're into that kind of thing, you might like SparkFun Electronics Bluetooth rotary phone and GSM rotary phone or ThinkGeek's retro Bluetooth handset.

Comment Re:Current users? (Score 1) 426

by talmage on Monday February 16, 2009 @06:41PM (#26878631) Attached to: Facebook's New Terms of Service

Done!

Comment Re:There still was this thing called "copyright" (Score 1) 426

by talmage on Monday February 16, 2009 @06:23PM (#26878353) Attached to: Facebook's New Terms of Service

Precisely! The FB ToS permit FB to compete against you with your own intellectual property.

As a semi-pro photographer, I've made beautiful portraits for friends for free because I wanted to. When I read the FB ToS, I had to ask my friends to take down those portraits. No artist should have to compete against any company for sales of his own work. The FB ToS make that possibility quite clear.

Flickr and Picasa Web have better ToS. Their use of your work is strictly limited to promoting the web sites. They will stop using your work when you take it down.

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