They’ve been loyal: when you signed up the registration form, they asked you if you were comfortable with APIs changing or an instable system. That’s what you’ll find once you get your sandbox account. APIs are there but haven’t been fully documented yet and most of your work when developing some robot/gadget will be in exploring the API sources (they’re open source, yau!) or searching for some examples on the samples gallery, which is an invaluable resource by the way.

Debugging is hard too, given that you can’t test what you done locally but you have to upload your code to AppEngine to see if it works (actually AppEngine is the only platform they accept requests from, but they plan to allow every host that talks the wave protocol in the future). This means that if, for example, there’s some typo in the code (i.e.: appendText() rather than AppendText()), you’d know only by looking at the AppEngine logs.

Be prepared to experience casual failures too. Sometimes your robot is working correctly and is receiving the whole wavelet (which is the whole conversation thread), but its response is ignored by the server for some unknown cause.

Anyway, even though there’s still some clear work in progress, I felt like the whole thing was quite exciting both from the user and as the developer point of view. The event model they thought for the external applications perfectly fits the nature of The Wave and gives room for some nice asynchronous applications. Hopefully, we’ll meet on Google Wave soon.

On first day, there were two keynotes: “A retrospective of how the community helped build Python 3.0”, held by Guido van Rossum and “Zen and the art of Abstractions’ maintenance” by Alex Martelli. I can just say that they were two extremely interesting talks which by the way weren’t diving too much — or any at all as in Guido’s talk — into code.

On the second day I really enjoyed two talks: “Erlang + Python, joining two worlds” by Lawrence Oluyede and a really great talk by Raymond Hettinger, “Easy AI with Python.” The former left me with a great curiosity about the functional languages world, while the latter really impressed me with how easy is to solve certain AI problems with Python (I solved many of the problems Raymond talked about previously, but never in Python and never really thought about even trying to).

On third day the Antonio Cangiano’s talk was enlightening. Even though it wasn’t really Python specific, he has given a great insight of how you can, well, “become rich with Python.”

Unfortunately I didn’t follow the Sunday afternoon’s talks since my airplane was leaving at 3.00pm, but at the end I can say that this was an incredible experience that I hope I can make again next year. And as a side note: the food was marvelous.

pcm.!dmix {
   type plug
   slave {
       pcm surround51
       channels 6
   }
}
pcm.!default {
   type plug
   slave.pcm "dmix"
   slave.channels 6
   route_policy duplicate
}

It’s from several years that I don’t do anything IRC related, but this time I had two special weapons in my backpack: python and twisted. The final bot is ~90 lines of code, half of the which are for the hello list and the entire coding process took less than 20 minutes.

Here follows the bot source code; note that this is in italian but could be easily translated in your language:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :

from twisted.words.protocols import irc
from twisted.internet import reactor, protocol

import random

class HelloBot(irc.IRCClient):
    nickname = "Hola"
    channel = "channel"

    ciao = (
            ('arabo', 'hala'),
            ('bulgaro', 'zdrasti'),
            ('ceco', 'ahoj'),
            ('chamorro', 'hafa adai'),
            ('chichewa', 'moni bambo'),
            ('coreano', 'ahn nyeong'),
            ('croato', 'boke'),
            ('ensperanto', 'saluton'),
            ('francese', 'salut'),
            ('georgiano', 'gamardjoba'),
            ('greco', 'yia sou'),
            ('hawaiano', 'aloha'),
            ('inglese', 'hello'),
            ('irlandese', 'fáilte'),
            ('italiano', 'ciao'),
            ('klingon', 'nuqneH'),
            ('lussemburghese', 'moïen'),
            ('maori', 'kia ora'),
            ('navajo', 'ya\'at\'eeh'),
            ('nepalese', 'namaste'),
            ('polacco', 'czesc'),
            ('portoghese', 'olá'),
            ('rumeno', 'bun? ziua'),
            ('russo', 'pree-vyet'),
            ('serbo', 'dobar dan'),
            ('sloveno', 'živjo'),
            ('spagnolo', 'holà'),
            ('svedese', 'hej'),
            ('taitiano', 'ia orana'),
            ('tedesco', 'hallo'),
            ('turco', 'merhaba'),
            ('ucraino', 'pryvit'),
            ('vietnamese', 'xin chào'),
            ('zulu', 'sawubona'),
    )

    def connectionMade(self):
        irc.IRCClient.connectionMade(self)

    def connectionLost(self, reason):
        irc.IRCClient.connectionLost(self, reason)

    def signedOn(self):
        self.join(self.channel)

    def privmsg(self, user, channel, msg):
        user = user.split('!', 1)[0]
        # private message?
        if channel == self.nickname:
            self.msg(user, "I can't")
            return

    def irc_JOIN(self, user, channel):
        user = user.split('!')[0]
        channel = channel[0]

        x = random.randint(0, len(self.ciao) - 1)
        if user == self.nickname:
            msg = "%s! (ora sapete come dire ciao in %s)" % (self.ciao[x][1], self.ciao[x][0])
        else:
            msg = "%s %s! (ora sai come dire ciao in %s)" % (self.ciao[x][1], user, self.ciao[x][0])

        self.msg(channel, msg)

class StartBot(protocol.ClientFactory):
    protocol = HelloBot

    def clientConnectionLost(self, connector, reason):
        connector.connect()

    def clientConnectionFailed(self, connector, reason):
        print "Connection failed: ", reason
        reactor.stop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    random.seed()
    f = StartBot()
    reactor.connectTCP("irc.server.com", 6667, f)
    reactor.run()

Additionally, I published the slides of my yesterday’s presentation. If you’re interested, you can freely download them, but please note that they’re written in italian. You can found the PyGTK talk’s slides here, while the PyClutter’s slides can be found here (sources here and here).

Last year I had a talk about Inkscape and the vectorial graphic; this year, instead, I’ll hold two talks: an introduction to PyGTK and an introduction to PyClutter.

So, if you don’t have anything to do on October 27th and you live near Bari, why don’t you join us in the LinuxDay?

(the title is a quote from a Tarantino’s film, do you like it?)

\setlength{\parskip}{10pt plus 1pt minus 1pt}

and after this line, all the paragraph will have the chosen interline (of course, you need to adjust the parameters according to your needs).

So that’s why a developed BeerCoaster manager. Yes, I done a program that help me to keep my collection organized. It is still a bit rudimentary but does its job pretty well. So, if you’re a beer coaster collector like me, you’ll found this useful.

It’s written in Python and uses sqlite as database to store it’s informations, so it is portable across various platforms (i.e.: you can copy & paste your files from Linux to Windows and it will keep working).

Currently, it can be downloaded only by SVN and it is everything but stable. I hope to release something good within the end of year.

The project homepage is hosted on Google project: http://bcmanager.googlecode.com/

Getting it working under Windows, currently, is really hard: for the final releases, though, I should provide a Windows installer.

Let say that I first thought that the problem was the WPA, so I changed the authentication to WEP but the result didn’t changed.

First of all: this Fonera comes with the 0.7.1-1 (or 0.7.1 r1, as you want to call it, it’s the same) firmware, so it’s “hackable” with exploits published by several sources. But as you connect the Fonera to internet, it automatically downloads the new 0.7.1-2 firmware that apply a patch to the web interfaces so you can’t use that exploits anymore. Why do I wanted to exploit it? Well, my intentions wasn’t to exploit it to get the Fonera unlocked, I just needed a ssh connection because I wanted to understand why the wireless signal was lost.

When you exploited it (I won’t tell you how to do, google is full of this information) and finally you had access to a ssh connection, you’ll get something like this:

kratorius@becks:~$ ssh root@169.254.255.1
root@169.254.255.1's password:

BusyBox v1.1.3 (2006.11.21-19:49+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
_______  _______  _______
|   ____||       ||   _   |
|   ____||   -   ||  | |  |
|   |    |_______||__| |__|
|___|
Fonera Firmware (Version 0.7.1 rev 1) -------------
*
* Based on OpenWrt - http://openwrt.org
* Powered by FON - http://www.fon.com
---------------------------------------------------

root@OpenWrt:~#

The root’s password for ssh is “admin”. Well, we have access into the router, so where should we begin to look at? Obviously, let see what dmesg says. You’ll soon notice that the log is literally full of this printk’statement:

wifi0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 4)

And let see the ifconfig’s output:

root@OpenWrt:~# ifconfig
ath1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:84:18:0A:72
inet addr:192.168.10.1  Bcast:192.168.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:2290  Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:84:18:0A:70
UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:743 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1415 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:63354 (61.8 KiB)  TX bytes:630340 (615.5 KiB)
Interrupt:4 Base address:0x1000

eth0:1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:84:18:0A:70
inet addr:169.254.255.1  Bcast:169.254.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
Interrupt:4 Base address:0x1000
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wifi0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:84:18:0A:71
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:2119 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:128
TX packets:280 errors:116 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:124155 (121.2 KiB)  TX bytes:31857 (31.1 KiB)
Interrupt:3 Memory:b0000000-b00ffffc

Do you see anything strange? Sure? Did you look at the MTU value in ath1? Yes, it’s 2290. And it’s so damn high. For an ethernet connection such value should be between 1000 and 2000 but usually for wireless connection it is set to 1492. Well change it to 1492 with:

root@OpenWrt:~# ifconfig ath1 mtu 1492

And you’ll get everything working. Obviously, you should disable the automatic firmware update, otherwise as soon as the Fonera updates its firmware you’ll get your wireless connection not working again. This is done by commenting the last line in /bin/thinclient (there’s written “. /tmp/.thinclient.sh”, just put a # in front of it). And now you can use the Fonera.