Obscene Art

Just a short post today to celebrate Webmin’s 10th birthday! I managed to corner Jamie and force him to answer a few questions for this interview at In the Box (In the Box is the official Webmin blog), and we’re running a logo contest over on SitePoint which is going swimmingly…it’s the most popular contest running right now.

I think it’s pretty cool that Webmin is going to cross the 9 million download (from SourceForge…hard to say how many downloads from other sources) mark during Webmin’s birthday month.

I started using Webmin over 8 years ago, in an early pre-1.0 version, and it’s saved me so much time and effort over the years…it’s a real staple of the system administrator diet, along with: OpenSSH (which turned 9 last month!), vim, lsof, strace, and lots more. Open Source has really had an impact on the systems management market–perhaps more in that field than any other–and Webmin is an important part of that, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

So I bought a wireless web cam so I can keep an eye on my dog when I’m out of the house. It’s a cute little Panasonic BL-C20A. Reasonably good reviews and a reasonably good price. Problem is, it has some stupid Windows only automatic setup program. Argh. The camera itself works fine with Linux (reportedly) or Mac OS X, but you need Windows and ActiveX to install it in the only documented way. I usually don’t buy any hardware that doesn’t work out of the box with Linux (limits my hardware choices, but saves me lots of hassle). But for reasons I won’t go into, this was the only good option, so I bought it against my better judgment.

Anyway, on to the fun. The camera is completely configurable without Windows, if you’re even slightly computer savvy.

Here’s what you do:

Plug it into your DHCP enabled router. Or a switch if you have a server providing DHCP. I think you need DHCP for this, and I don’t think it knows how to fall back to a static IP address in the event DHCP fails. But maybe I’m wrong.

Turn it on.

Give it a few seconds to find an IP.

Now, run a ping scan using nmap:

$ nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24

Where 192.168.1.0 is replaced with your local network address. Find the one that isn’t one of your existing machines (hopefully you don’t have too many). Hit that address with any browser. It’ll ask you to set an admin password, and from there you can configure it just like our Windows brethren. Done! I can’t imagine why they had to write a big cumbersome ActiveX encumbered Windows application just for that, but that’s the way it is. The web-based UI seems to be browser agnostic once you’ve got it running.

It’s worth noting that the IP might also show up in your DHCP leases list…but it didn’t in my Ruckus Metroflex, so it seems to not handle DHCP correctly (or the Ruckus doesn’t…but all other devices show up in leases).

I’m feeling very independent-minded these days about the upcoming elections. What with the leading candidates from both parties serving a master that I can’t quite see and definitely don’t understand, it’d be impossible to feel anything but disenfranchised. But there’s something interesting happening on reddit, digg, and You Tube: Independent-minded candidates Ron Paul and Mike Gravel are getting a lot of attention. They resonate with a pretty big bunch of people. I’m not talking partisan politics here. I’m talking about a couple of guys who surprise us with their honesty, and their sincerity.

So, when I stumbled upon this story at the Daily Kos (not something I read very often…I saw it on Reddit) it really hit me that this could be the best and most important election year in my lifetime. Now, I’m not imagining that the big party politicos are going to accept either of these guys. And, they’ve raised so little money that it’s almost laughable to think they might make it to the primaries, much less take the nomination. But, the day is coming when the Internet is going to decide a national election (some say it’s already happened, in the form of voting shifts large enough to hand the office to another party…perhaps the Greens diversion of votes away from Gore cost the Democrats the election, perhaps not). Maybe this is the year.

My daily web browsing doesn’t include any overtly political websites, but Reddit does have its share of politics coverage. It’s probably biased. I’m probably completely out of the loop on who can be a contender. I get the impression that the mainstream media don’t want to cover Ron Paul or Mike Gravel. But maybe the mainstream media have reached the level of irrelevance needed to allow some independent candidates to rise to the top. I don’t know.

Anyway, the idea of an election pitting Mike Gravel vs. Ron Paul has me feeling a little light-headed. Y’all start talking about it. Get a bumper sticker or something. Really, tell your friends. (These guys are both solid on the issues that you, dear reader, and I almost certainly agree on: privacy, Internet rights, ending the war. Interesting how the two parties leading candidates are aligned against us on those issues, and yet I feel confident assuming you agree with me. Something’s wrong with that sort of system.)

I made a silly button:

Perl 6 is the mythical creature that will allow Perl programmers to use a nice object orientation system, sane named arguments, better meta-programming (macros!), lazy lists, and lots of other cleanups of the syntax and common idioms. Interestingly, it also adds the option of strong typing with argument constraints built right in (my only experience with this kind of thing in the past has been a passing acquaintance with traits in Python, but I know enough to know it’s nice). I’ve read the Apocalypses approximately 100 years ago, and so I imagine I must have known all of these things were coming, but forgot all about it. But, watching Audrey’s video at the YAPC:Asia conference (warning, slides are in Japanese…I’m sure I missed a few good bits, but the code shown is in perl, the universal language, so the gist is clear no matter your native tongue) has gotten me really excited about Perl 6 again. It’s actually going to be released within my lifetime (probably), and possibly as soon as Christmas of this year. And that’s not even the most interesting thing about this video!

Watch the video at Google Video

What’s most interesting about this video is that pugs may be the most important thing to come out of the Perl 6 process (rather than a temporary mechanism for writing Perl 6 test cases while parrot develops). If you work in pugs, you can use Perl 6, Perl 5, Haskell, and all of the libraries that those languages have available without thinking much about it. You can also call out to Java seamlessly, but who gives a crap about that? (I guess the libraries in Java give it some value, and if you can use them from a good language all the better.) This seems to be a core feature in Perl 6, so I guess the Parrot version of Perl 6 will have the capability, too. Since I embody one of Larry’s three virtues (laziness), I like this. Of course, I’m also fascinated by functional programming, and have been reading MJD’s Higher Order Perl, and so the seamless integration of Haskell and Perl sounds very tasty to me.

One last thing I didn’t know about: Moose. Perl 6 style objects in Perl 5. This is nice. I don’t like Perl 5 objects, and really enjoy Ruby objects…this bridges that gap. I might actually use object orientated programming in my projects, now. Maybe.