English

> Title: The Italian Man who went to Malta

I was on my way to the office (yes, on Sunday: I have stuff to do ;) ), when I see something that doesn’t look correct or “in the right place”. A Fox in the middle of Boundary Row!!! [](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/AFoxInBoundaryRowO_o)[A Fox in Boundary Row O_o](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/AFoxInBoundaryRowO_o) I don’t know, probably was bringing to my desk Firefox 3 RC1 ;) Yes yes, I know: Firefox is not a [en:Fox], but a Red Panda!!!.

After some playing with Unslung on my Linksys NSLU2, I realize it was a “very limited solution” for our needs. We need to share 4 (sometimes 5) NTFS (or others) volumes, where everyone of them is 500GB: this is too much even for the modified firmware of Unslung, unable to read the full directory trees (and the contained files) of my massive movie’s collection. [](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign)[The Debian/NSLU2's Reign](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign) So, I came back to the Debian/NSLU2 solution. This time, with all the intention to make it work. It’s quite pointless to report here all the things I did to make it work in the way I want/need. I’ll just write down the most important bits: ...

This time the main topic was about “Developer Productivity”. It was one of the most funny I have ever attended: a couple of speaker were just “crazy” (but in a good way)! ;) If interested in knowing more, here is a transcript of the event: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dm58hwb_5f93zjrcd.

Motivated by my friend KM here (sorry, Italian link), I decided to buy a Linksys NSLU2, a Micro-[en:NAS] based on [en:Linux]. Linksys (owned by Cisco) released since day one the source code of the tuned Linux Kernel, instantly allowing the Open Source community to hack this device in a million of ways. My requirements are very simple: I need to share something like 6 external HD using either Samba or FTP+HTTP. I first tried to use the “out-of-the-box” NSLU2 with the latest firmware, but it’s unable to manage more than 2 disks (on an HUB, it just see the first HDD attached). I then decided to use Debian/NSLU2, a very rich distribution for [en:ARM] that is just amazing. The only problem? It seems too much for an hardware like NSLU2, plus, after a normal apt-get dist-upgrade something related with [en:SELinux] and vsftpd happened and I didn’t managed to put it all back to work. I should have disabled selinux passing the parameter selinux = 0 to the Kernel at boot time but… there is no “easily modifiable” [en:Bootloader] to pass parameters to the kernel at boot time (at least, as far as I know). I suppose that I should modify the kernel, recompile and then re-flash it. Too much for something I want to finish in max 2 days. And the NSLU2 is slow. Very slow. It took something like 12 hours to make the full installation of Debian and flash re-flash the firmware. Besides, for what I need to do, it’s not worth it to do all this. ...

2.2 miles ~= 3.54 kms This time I was running with Luca: we pushed a bit the speed… but we practically died at the end of Blackfriars Bridge: still good, but next time I need to slow down to last more. Wish me good luck. I will run on the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge on July ;)

2.05 miles ~= 3.3 kms Today I took it a bit easy: John was with me and he has a problem with his knee, so we decided to do only 2 miles to start. Very beautiful day: looks like full summer, with a very strong sun smiling to us. We passed through a big festival/party/something in South Bank: a lot of people enjoying ice creams, watching shows and other stuff for kids. I tried to google for it, but I didn’t manage to know what’s going on up there.

2.79 miles ~= 4.49 kms Almost to 3 miles. On Monday we will see if I can do that.

Fancy $PS1 setting The code to make the Bash prompt looks like mine is (~/.bashrc): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 case $TERM in xterm*|rxvt*) TITLEBAR='\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]' ;; *) TITLEBAR="" ;; esac; PS1="${TITLEBAR}\n\[\033[0;0m\][\033[0;32m\]time: \ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\t\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-\ [\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]host: \[\033[0m\]\ \[\033[1;31m\]\h\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-\ [\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]user: \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\u\ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]-[\[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;32m\]bash: \ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\v\[\033[0;0m\]]\n\ \[\033[0;0m\][\[\033[0;32m\]cwd: \[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;31m\]\w\ \[\033[0m\]\[\033[0;0m\]]# " Thanks to Bash Prompt HOWTO.