opensource – Made by Mikal

pngtools, code that can nearly drink in the US

I was recently contacted about availability problems with the code for pngtools. Frankly, I’m mildly surprised anyone still uses this code, but I am happy for them to do so. I have resurrected the code, placed it on github, and included the note below on all relevant posts:

A historical note from November 2020: this code is quite old, but still actively used. I have therefore converted the old subversion repository to git and it is hosted at https://github.com/mikalstill/pngtools. I will monitor there for issues and patches and try my best to remember what I was thinking 20 years ago…

On Selecting a Well Engaged Open Source Vendor

Aptira is in an interesting position in the Open Source market, because we don’t usually sell software. Instead, our customers come to us seeking assistance with deciding which OpenStack to use, or how to embed ONAP into their nationwide networks, or how to move their legacy networks to the software defined future. Therefore, our most common role is as a trusted advisor to help our customers decide which Open Source products to buy.

(My boss would insist that I point out here that we do customisation of Open Source for our customers, and have assisted many in the past with deploying pure upstream solutions. Basically, we do what is the right fit for the customer, and aren’t obsessed with fitting customers into pre-defined moulds that suit our partners.)

That makes it important that we recommend products from companies that are well engaged with their upstream Open Source communities. That might be OpenStack, or ONAP, or even something like Open Daylight. This raises the obvious question – what makes a company well engaged with an upstream project?

Read more over at my employer’s blog…

PNGtools 0.4

Wow, this is a blast from the past. When I wrote the pngchunks command in 2003, I had never seen a 64 bit machine, and knew enough to check that an int was the right size, but not enough to just use the guaranteed-to-be-32-bit version from day 1. I’d pretty much forgotten about this code until I got pinged about this Debian bug. The bug reporter is entirely right, this was lame.

PNGtools 0.4 should be 64 bit safe. The pngchunks command works on my 64 bit machines at least.

Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007

It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically:

 IPTraf
 # Statistics for eth0 ##########################################################
 #                                                                              #
 #               Total      Total    Incoming   Incoming    Outgoing   Outgoing #
 #             Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes #
 # Total:       241091    228940K       96646   18025370      144445    210915K #
 # IP:          241091    225548K       96646   16655328      144445    208892K #
 # TCP:         241086    225547K       96643   16655034      144443    208892K #
 # UDP:              4        412           2        266           2        146 #
 # ICMP:             0          0           0          0           0          0 #
 # Other IP:         1         28           1         28           0          0 #
 # Non-IP:           0          0           0          0           0          0 #
 #                                                                              #
 #                                                                              #
 # Total rates:      49188.4 kbits/sec        Broadcast packets:            0   #
 #                    6592.2 packets/sec      Broadcast bytes:              0   #
 #                                                                              #
 # Incoming rates:    3814.2 kbits/sec                                          #
 #                    2714.4 packets/sec                                        #
 #                                            IP checksum errors:           0   #
 # Outgoing rates:   45374.2 kbits/sec                                          #
 #                    3877.8 packets/sec                                        #
 # Elapsed time:   0:00 #########################################################
  X-exit

Yay for LCA 2007 videos.

My first sighting of the ImageMagick book in the wild

My ImageMagick book is for sale at the MySQL user’s conference trade show. There are only a few copies there, but it is nice to actually see it out there. I wonder if they’ll sell any copies?

CD ROM

Working on the linux.conf.au 2005 CD ROM still… Some slight tweaks to make it work nicer on Windows and MacOS of all things. This is all based on my testing, as no one else seems to care enough to have bothered to give it a try. Meh.

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2005/ if you care…

Second beta of linux.conf.au 2005 CD ROM

There is a second beta of the linux.conf.au 2005 CD ROM, including an ISO image this time, available at http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2005/. If people could have a poke around and point out any errors to me, that would be mightily neighbourly.

I don’t have time to take the CD ROM project much further than producing the image, due to imminent buggering off from Australia, but it is my fond hope that we’ll have the CD out before this year’s yuletide festivities.

(I’ve been watching Firefly, and I think it’s affecting my language style. Why on earth did Fox cancel that series, and worse than that, why did it gross so badly at the cinema?)

First beta of the LCA 2005 CD ROM

The first beta version of the LCA 2005 CD ROM is hosted here at http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2005/cdrom-beta-1/. Feedback is encouraged — please send it to mikal@stillhq.com.

This announcement is sitting at the front page of the Linux Australia Mirror Project server. I would appreciate any comments people have on the beta CD ROM, especially what extra content I can fill the left over 150 megabytes with. I’ve tried to fill the empty space with useful looking things, but my brain is rapidly emptying.

LCA CD continues

I thought I would add the conference wiki to the CD as well, but htrack does a terrible job of mirroring PHP wikis — mainly because of the large number of possible ways to view a page. Does anyone know of a better way to provide an off line view of a wiki like this?

The LCA 2005 conference CD

I’m bored, so I’m making a LCA conference CD. Given that we have no audio, and that the corrupt video is quite big and will be online soon (I just need to wrangle the data across), I’m looking for other things to fill the CD with. So far I’ve decided that photos of the conference would be cool. So, if you have some photos which you wouldn’t mind being on the CD drop me an email and I’ll see what I can do. I’m happy with stamp the images with a domain name like I do here if that makes people happier.