Last weekend (2009 10/17~10/18), I went to Yahoo Open Hack Day Taiwan. The event seems has been become a big PR issue of Yahoo, only because a few minutes of lap dance.

Before I talked about what I feel about lap dance as a developer joined this event, I like to share about what we did in this event. As a team with hychen, tusng and honki, we were thinking about implement a self-learning web site, which provides a bookmarklet or plugin to let you look up the English words. And also help you to convert unfamiliar word on computer into physical flash card. But after we got there, we found this web site does not really use any Yahoo!API.

So, we pick up another idea from my never-have-time-to-start TODO list. We called it Synker,the original idea is to help people sync photos from any social network website into their own Google/Yahoo contacts. But we don’t want to have an avatar, we like to have photos with really face of our contacts. So we only use photos with face identified by integrated face detection technology. If you use these contact services on your phone, you will find it extremely useful when you try to remember someone when he/she calls.

After changed the idea, we start to implement it at Saturday afternoon. And finally we do can login with Yahoo account, download the contacts and find possible photo from Wretch profile and albums. It’s quite slow but it works. We tried to find Wretch girls hired by Yahoo as staffs to be our beta testers, it turns out that much of people don’t really use Yahoo! Contacts or Yahoo!360 lately. So most of the contacts are added very long time ago when YIM is still popular in Taiwan. For the local Wretch users, it might be much more useful if we can help them link their wretch users back to Yahoo contacts. However, Synker should be a service to help people sync photo into different contact service, the web site is now still a prototype, we might finish it later when we are available.

However, we did not win any award. Thanks to Erik Eldridge, at least we are mentioned in his favorite hacks list. But still, I have a lot of fun work with my teammate to implement a web site from scratch. I do enjoy to get tired, beard grown and smelly with friends after a non-stop 24 hours hacking. It’s exciting to experience issue and fix them together. It’s fun and we never stop laughing.

Thanks to Yahoo for organized this event. Without this event, I probably won’t get any chance to study Yahoo!APIs, and work with my friends on these APIs all day long. Thanks!

Sexism ?

So, many people feels women are offended, and they said sexism is bad for creating an inclusive environment in industry. I have to say please don’t judge the organizer before you understand the local culture. Applying your own viewpoints to the other side of earth is globalism, which does not help to create an inclusive environment.

As a developer staying there for the whole event, I don’t see the any lady are offended. But we, the shyly nerds are probably more insulted.

One my the other female friend XDite, she has been attend to Yahoo Open Hack Day since last year. She has same feeling as I do, we don’t feel it’s offending women. The dancing show is only a few minutes. We disliked it because it’s very annoyed for developers, since we have been coding for hours, a loudly music and dancing show just make us headache. It’s just annoying as the anchorwoman made some stupid jokes and asked developers to dance before the warding ceremony. It’s perhaps humiliated us much more then the dance girls.

Seriously, No! There are many female staffs around and many of the many of the top managers of Yahoo!Kimo Taiwan are female! And also the other female members in the other team. I don’t see there is any sexism issue in Yahoo and this event. However, I can understand why they like to have the dancing show, one for cheer the developers up after long time work, the other reason is to satisfy the local sick mass media.

The dancing show is only a few minutes, not the major part of the event. And we don’t care about the show, since we are really busy on get the things work. And yes, the kind of entertainments are expected in many IT events. It might comes from the history of southerns Taiwanese funerals and temple fair. People think it’s important to entertain Spirits, and living people, so they hire strippers to dance in public. It’s a symbol of supplicatory.

And somewhat this kind of traditions infected the IT event, but much more refined. Now, without Show Girls in a IT event, you will never get reported on local mainstream media. And this kind of tradition are spread in the world, which you can see many show girls on the online IT web sites.

It’s now become yet another industry for provide profession performing in IT events (commercial IT events does not mean open source software conference or hackathon). In addition, the dancing girl are professional dancers, they are not just boob girls or some woman found from the strip club. They are payed as profession for performing. I meant is creating something with your mind is much respectable then creatively with the body ? And what’s wrong that these ladies choose dancing as profession, is that one of talents should be appreciated ?

If you ask my opinion, I dislike this kind of arrangement it’s because it disturbed me. And don’t blame Yahoo, it’s totally not an issue of sexism of the event, you idiot. It’s about the sicked (local and global) media. Please go fight with the mainstream media if you think they are sexist, and many Taiwanese are already doing so.

這是連續第三年上台在 COSCUP 分享 OpenWRT 相關的經驗，前兩年談得是基本的使用、或是稍微進階一點修改韌體給一兩百人的研討會使用，稍微還帶到一點技術。

今年的分享，試著想要切合研討會的「Open source friendly hardware platform」的連續議程的主題，切成兩部份，一部分是 OpenWRT 偏商業應用與分析，分析過去一年來在網通市場的生態系統中，不同層面的廠商各用了甚麽樣的策略與方法去應用 OpenWRT 這套開源的系統，並且對業務與市場可以有甚麽樣的幫助。第二部份，則請在網通代工廠工作的 macpaul ，分享從網通廠工程師的角度，以 OpenWRT 做開發的實務整合經驗與效能結果。

我的簡報可於此下載，macpaul 的部份可於此觀看。全程演講之錄影也已經上線。有任何問題，歡迎與我聯絡，或留言於此。更歡迎在網通產業的前輩給予指教，特別是國內網通廠或 SoC 晶片廠對 OpenWRT 的態度與看法。

This is my third time to share my experience on OpenWRT project at COSCUP. The last two year I have shared the basic usage and software framework of OpenWRT, and also my experience to customize the OpenWRT firmware for open source conferences for allowing more then 100 people get connected with wifi in single room.

This year, I like to line up with the track ‘Open source friendly hardware’. So with another speaker Macpaul, we split the talk into two parts. The first part is presented by me, talked about how the industry use OpenWRT in their products, and how OpenWRT can do in the ecosystem. I tried to analysis how the strategies work on the business and marketing. The second part is presented by mapcual, as a OEM vendor engineer, macpaul shared his experience on day-on-day router firmware development, and the performance of the OpenWRT software stack.

At the beginning of this conference,  we were thinking about invite the core developers of OpenWRT project. But due to the limit of the event funding, the team can not afforded the ticket and hotel for trip of speaker. Hope, next year we will have opportunity to invite the core developers from the other country.

Photo is taken by Jim Grisanzio, The best photo of my talk I can find on Internet. Thanks! Jim.

In order to access some embedded system, network equipments, wifi routers, I usually need to use serial communication programs like kermit, minicom.

However, I usually need to access to different devices with different baud rate. So, I wrote some scripts for helping me.

The first one is kermit.sh, which get the options from environment variable. It’s using /dev/ttyUSB0 by default, and 9600 as baud rate. If you want to use differnt device name, just type

$ kermit.sh # using default
$ DEVICE=/dev/ttyUSB1 SPEED=115200 kermit.sh

The script will also save a session log in /tmp, it will show you the filename after you exit from the terminal. However, since kermit is not free. (because it ask developers who make modifications send back the chages). I also wrote another script for minicom.

This is a tip for Debian GNU/Linux.

Many times, you would like to record every work and commands in the terminal session. In the situations like checking the server’s status, testing new softwares, changing the configurations, fighting with crackers.. things like that.

In that moment, you don’t have time to take notes on every commands, but trying to get the system running. However, you will also want to check the log of the commands and outputs.

There is a very useful command named script (1) in the bsdutils packages. The software will help you make typescript of everything printed in the terminal, including your input. So, you can use this software to record your works, and review it later.

No only the things printed in your terminal, you can also save the timing data with ‘-t‘ option. The timing data will be outputted to standard error, you can save it by redirect the standard error to a file. Then you can play back the typescripts by scriptreplay (1).

Therefore, you could show how you get thing down to your friends/colleague by playing the typescript. Just like watch a movie.

For a easier usage, I wrote a small script. The script will help me save the typescript in the filename I assigned or time stamp.

Usage is very simple

$ ./script.sh # save the typescript as time stamp filename
$ ./script.sh mission-critical.log # save the typescript as mission-critical.log

This is a tip for Debian GNU/Linux.

Since the Slashdot (The website for nerds) lunched a new AJAX-style comment filtering system, it’s much easier to read the high-score-interesting-and-Insightful comments for stories.

If you look closer, you will find an arrow in the comments list of a story. The arrow is keyboard shortcuts indication just like gmail, which help you read the messages by using the keyboard.

But the keybindings are different with Gmail or other forum discussion system. You can learn the keybindings in Slashdot’s FAQ.

/* keys
prev comment: A, H
next comment: D, L
prev thread: W, J
next thread: S, K
prev comm chrono: Q
next comm chrono: E
next unread comm: F
reply to current comment: R
parent of current comment: P
history (modlog) of current comment: M
hide history: X
skip to end (last): V
skip to top (first): T
get more comments: G
lower top threshold: [
raise top threshold: ]
lower bottom threshold: ,
raise bottom threshold: .
toggle d2 widget: /
*/

Have you experienced that the useful ScribeFire (a nice WYSIWYG blog tool for firefox extenstion) crashed, and you lost the latest post which you just wrote for a few hours ?

If the answer is yes, and you are using ScribeFire 2.3.2 and restart the Firefox and visit this blog for searching how to recover your hard work.

I am sorry to tell you, it’s too late, your work is overwritten.

If you did not restart the browser and lunch the ScribeFire, then you got luck. Backup the performancing-notes.xml file in your firefox/profile/extensions as soon as possible, it’s your latest chance to save it.

The problem is because the ScribeFire editor does not save the editor state by autosave, when the firefox crashed. And it will use the old content in editor state to overwrote your latest ‘saved work‘.

This is a small but very annoying issue, which break your hard work. Hope it will be fixed very soon. You can find a workaround patch in Issue 714 of ScribeFire’s issue list system.