Prerequisites:

1. Load up your IRC client and connect to well-known and well-used channels.
2. Go to a general pastebin (pastebin.ca).
3. Load up a new entry and make sure it doesn't give where this might be relevent.

Your task:

• By looking at the contents of the paste you must find the correct channel that the paste is related to!

Further tasks:

• If you feel daring, you could attempt to answer the question that was asked on the channel by only looking at the pastebin. For example:
• • You see the pastebin containing something like this: http://pastebin.ca/100957
  • You guess that it's in a PHP-related channel.
  • The first PHP-related channel that comes to mind is ##php on freenode, so you go there and type "You used the assignment operator instead of the comparing operator. You should use two equal signs" - hmm, is that worded extremely bad?

I'm sure this game will be a new craze!

SmartLife is an application that has just been thought of. It is for reading Liferea feeds on your Windows Mobile SmartPhone. It consists of two parts:

1. The SmartPhone app: This will be constructed using the .NET Compact Framework and will parse the XML that Liferea stores its feeds in.
2. The Liferea synchronization: This will consist of a simple script to copy the files needed to the SmartPhone.

More information is at the Trac project site: https://jonnylamb.no-ip.org/SmartLife/

As a follow up from my previous post, I have had some more ideas about this mail client/server. I think I would write this using C# and as the server is in no way graphical is completely cross-platform. The server side actually has a very simple task. For now, I am assuming it is only dealing with mail.

If the server ran C#, then a simple System.Net.Sockets.TcpListener class would sort out the server aspect of it. The only real thing that has to be thought out is how to store the main, and in what format... I'd definately send out XML to clients, and with C#, that too would be terrifically easy! So there are really only a few things to be decided about the server:

• The format of storage for permanent mail. This is important as it needs to be able to deal with binary data as well as easy ascii. An advantage of IMAP is that certain parts of an email can be retrieved based on its MIME type- this would be a good idea to implement.
• The XML schema used when sending mail and sending folder structure to clients.
• When to send mail, and how. If it was sent with every folder change, then it could be sluggish to use. However, if it was completely sent at startup it might take an age to startup. Only sending headers would work fine, but then you couldn't preview the message when browsing the folders.

Note: the word send in this context means transferring data from server to client. I'm not dealing with sending e-mails yet! Although, I expect sending emails would be pretty easy, just send some XML from the client to server and send it through some kind of MTA.

Retrieving the mail would also be a bit of an issue- how? rely on an existing mail server or what? This is completely undecided and does not need to be thought of until mail storage (the main point of this project) is sorted.

If that worked, then the other things what would be great are:

• a calendar - This would be fairly easy to implement. Again I'd need to think of a way to store the data, and how to send the data to the client, but it doesn't have the problems of mail- of having to actually access the outside world!
• tasks - This would be even easier and has the same plus/minus points as a calendar.
• plugins - I have SynCE in mind. By the time this leaves the ground, there will probably be some kind of sync support for Windows Mobile 5 devices and a plugin for that would be great- I've no idea how hard that would be to implement, but it would be terrifically useful.

But I think the most important part of this whole project is the name...

A while ago, I delighted you all with my struggles to get the bcm43xx driver working... Yesterday I kind of came close.. again.

After finally finding out why I couldn't find the option in the kernel config, I found out that I didn't have CONFIGIEEE80211SOFTMAC enabled, and when I did, success: CONFIG_BCM43XX was available. After compiling this kernel, making sure ndiswrapper didn't load on startup, I restarted. However, with the new drivers (that seemed to load and find my card fine) I couldn't get myself an IP address- great.

Somehow, I found out that my 2.6.17 patched to 2.6.18-rc1 kernel did work though. However, I had a different problem with that kernel- it wasn't really telling the system about its version and upon trying to use module-assistant it came up with errors saying it couldn't find the kernel sources.

So now I've finally downgraded back to 2.6.17 where my kernel headers can be found, but I'm back to using ndiswrapper, and I don't care anymore!

...change everything in the case except for the case, HDD, optical drives and wireless card. Then you'll have that lovely dist-upgraded feel!

I played Dyson's Canterbury Pilgrims last Saturday, and I can officially say that it was by far one of the worst pieces I have ever played. I don't want to spend too long dwelling in it now, but to sum it up for anyone out there: if you're asked to play it- say no.