howforge.com

A friend of mine is playing with DreamBox DM500. In fact, I don't have any satellite receivers but it is very promising. If I would like to have one, it will be mine. Anyway, DM500 is innovated by Germany company so no doubt to lack Thai language support. He is trying to solve this problem. I don't understand what EPG is but he has just released Thai EPG yesterday. Anyway, building DM500 is a long process even on fast machine so he asked me to help on machine under my control. Below is what I have done to build TuxBox on Centos 4.1.

One of powerful tools bundled with debian-based distros is aptitude since it is capable to resolve many dependencies among packages in several ways. For example, you are an end-user who wants to run Ubuntu as a guest OS inside VMware. After installation you might install VMware tools to improve speed and usability. However, the default installation profile didn't install development tools, says build-essential, for building kernel modules. So, you have to install build-essential as well as linux-headers to let VMware build kernel modules just for your current kernel. Do you remember that you are end-user. These packages are only used once and you will never use it for so long. They should be removed to save more disk space. Usually, you can do it by run apt-get remove all unused packages. Anyway, it is possible to just let aptitude do that process with a single command automatically. See below for detail instructions of installing VMware tools and then removing unused packages.

I'm thinking about the required factors to make a successful open source project for everyone regarding the project, e.g., owner, developer, contributer,power-user, end-user, and etc. Below are what in my mind.

I'am facing some trouble to access all Google services. It is a kind of DNS problem of my ISP. I tried to solve this problem temporary by myself using Tor because Ubuntu Dapper has Tor. Unfortunately, the latest Tor in Ubuntu Dapper is 0.1.1.16 which is already obsoleted so I saw below log in /var/log/tor/log.

Sep 09 18:53:50.167 [notice] Tor 0.1.0.16 opening log file.
Sep 09 18:53:50.181 [notice] Initialized libevent version 1.1a using method epoll
Sep 09 18:53:51.422 [notice] directory_get_from_dirserver(): No running dirservers known. Not trying. (purpose 1)
Sep 09 19:12:18.345 [notice] Application request when we're believed to be offline. Optimistically trying again.
Sep 09 19:12:41.713 [warn] You are running Tor version 0.1.0.16, which will not work with this network.
Please use one of 0.1.0.18,0.1.1.23.
Sep 09 19:12:45.662 [notice] Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like it's working.

One of todo in my mind (and maybe other content providers) is useful and comprehensive related links to somewhere automatically. To make it available in Drupal, I wrote Related Contents Block a while ago. Anyway, it only limited to only local contents. I hope to find better solution to make it more compresive. Eventually, I found .

I'm working on geographically distributed computing aka grid computing. Since there are so many resources on this planet, it would be beautiful to see them on the earth graphically. offers this kind of applications could be implemented in a few hours using or . All you need to know are pairs of latitude and longitude to identify where they are. Well, I also want to show the map in full-screen for easily navigating around the globe. In other words, it should resize itself according to browser size. Google doesn't tell me how to do it. Fortunately, I found it!