I need 4 Raspberry Pi’s

Chances are that by now, you have heard of the Raspberry Pi, a cheap, credit card sized ARM computer, capable of running Linux. As is seems that the distributors (RS Electronics and element14/Premier Farnell) are starting to ship them Real Soon Now, I was thinking how many of them I am going to need 🙂

I think I need 4, to start with:

• A Home Theater PC, running XBMC
• A Car PC
• A shower radio. This one will need a waterproof case, integated speakers, run on batteries and probably have a small integrated amplifier. It will also need WiFi, so it could be a model A without the ethernet interface.
• A NAS controller, although this might not be wise, since the harddisks can only be connected with USB. It’s worth the experiment, in any case.

I hope the Pi will become available in quantities soon!

Policykit adventures

After installing Debian on a laptop this week, once again, I ran into the “problem” of not being able to shutdown or reboot the computer, when another user is logged in, for example via SSH. If you’re a Linux user, maybe you have seen it:

System policy prevents restarting the system when other users are logged in

The cause of this behaviour is something called policykit, and a policy defined in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy. I found several pages on the web, that suggested to modify this file to change the policy. However, as this file is shipped by a package, and living below /usr/share, it is not intended to be modified by users to override the policies it contains.

The correct way to fix the problem is in something called PolicyKit Local Authority, or pklocalauthority. To enable all users to shutdown or reboot the computer, even when other users are logged in, create a file named /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/usershutdown.pkla (the name must end in .pkla) and put the following in it:

[Allow Shutdown]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

[Allow Restart]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart-multiple-users
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes


You may have to reboot the computer (or at least log out and back in) for the policy override to take effect.

Even in de stemming komen…

 
Aláááááááááááááf!

Google Chart Tools

Ik ben verzot op grafiekjes, dus een product als Google Chart Tools heeft altijd mijn interesse. En Google kennende maken ze het allemaal weer lekker simpel. Je kunt bijvoorbeeld gewoon naar één van de voorbeelden gaan, de voorbeeld-code copy-pasten in een WordPress post (oh ja, wel ff de html, head en body tags eruit mikken), et voilá:

Geinig he?

RE: Cisco Software Downloads – Registration Concerns

Yesterday, I registered a user account with cisco.com. As you can deduct from yesterday’s tweets, this was not a very pleasant experience. My frustration grew so big, that I, when prompted for feedback about the registration procedure, entered the F-word a few times to be done with it.

Today, however, I got a polite mail from a Cisco employee, asking me to elaborate on the issues I had. This is what I wrote. Let it be a lesson to people who design registration forms for websites.

Hi,

> > We appreciate your feedback and regret any inconvenience.

And I apologize for my choice of words in the feedback I sent you.

> > Can you please elaborate on the issues you faced with registration? Was
> > there a specific step or question that caused issues? These details will
> > help us improve the website for all customers.

Well, it took me no less than 9 times to successfully submit the registration form, including a few times were I forgot to re-enter a password, as this isn’t kept between subsequent submits.

A couple of annoyances:

•  The field named ‘Retype Email Address’ doesn’t make sense. Why do you want me to copy and paste my email address??
•  Phone number check is too strict. I entered ‘+3140……..’, which was declined because of the ‘+’.
•  Postal code check is too strict. I entered ‘5612 AX’, which is the offical notation in The Netherlands, but it was declined because of the space in the middle.
•  I am obliged to choose and answer 2 (two!) secret security questions. I do not understand how these questions increase security in any way, and I do not want to use them. I do not forget passwords (or rather: my secure password store doesn’t). Answers to ‘security questions’, however, I cannot remember and it is none of your business how my first pet was named.
•  If any of the entered values does not conform to what the website expects, a message is printed for the first error only. So you fix that, resubmit, find out you forgot the passwords, resubmit again, only to find out there a more errors to fix. That’s just dumb.
•  Finally, after submitting the form a number of times, the website gave me a ‘Your session timed out’ error, and all values were erased so I had to start from scratch.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
Martijn Grendelman

P.S. The evil registration form can be found here.