9 Mar 2004 jdub   » (Master)

Thanks for all the replies about Planet GNOME (already!), lots of food for thought. One particularly humorous response about John's posts: "On some days Planet Gnome is filled with his face and pages of text [...] like that scene in 'Being John Malkovich' where he is inside his own mind and everyone in the room looks like him. In that scene they are all having deep conversations using only the the words 'John Malkovich'." And so, today we offer a tribute to our own John. Malkovich. Malkovich-Malkovich.  #

Today's big thanks go to Wichert. Over the weekend, I finally got fed up with administering the MAC address lists in Craige's Airport. It's not often that I reboot my iBook into OS X, and none of my machines have a JVM on them to run the Java-based admin tool, so I needed another solution. The Airport supports RADIUS...

Enter pyrad, Wichert's pure Python RADIUS client, which also includes a simple server, and an aptly named Twisted module, "curved". Bingo! 10 or 12 lines of Python later, and we have a tiny little RADIUS server that accepts and rejects MAC addresses for the Airport.

Mister RADIUS is a quick hack-job, and doesn't use the Twisted module yet, but I'm sure it will be useful when I start my WRT54G + Twisted hacking in earnest. I wonder if anyone has experience using Twisted in an embedded environment yet...  #

On Planet GNOME

  • Should we have a separate page for interesting GNOME feeds that are not personal or written by human hands? It has been suggested that the FootNotes feed be removed, but it might make sense to aggregate it with similar feeds, such as FTP releases (soon with NEWS love), and other stuff we come up with.
  • What should the guidelines be for inclusion in Planet GNOME? I've been treading lightly on this one, because it's a tough call. My guideline so far has been "positive and mature regular contributor to GNOME". This has worked fairly well, and readers regularly voice their appreciation for this 'passive editing', so it seems to be a feature. I just want to make sure it's on the right track - for instance, so far I have resisted adding people who do packaging only. Obviously, the most important factor is what readers want, not what the egos of contributors want. It sounds a bit backwards, doesn't it? :-)
  • Why do people keep complaining about John Fleck's entries... and what should I do? So, the vast majority of John's posts are not GNOME related, and he does post in quick succession. But John is an upstanding member of the GNOME Old Fogies club, and a longstanding contributor (and one-time esteemed leader) of the GNOME Documentation Project. Funnily enough, a couple of the complaint mails have suggested a new Planet feature: Pooling a particular feed's daily entries into a single block. I'm almost tempted to hack it up, just for the amusement value.

Tell me what you think: jdub at gnome dot org.  #

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