Gentoo Catalyst LiveCD Builder

I just found a means to create your own Gentoo LiveCDs. Since I'm finally getting around to building my router, and retiring the pentium 133 that has served us so well these past 4 years, I thought that the replacement should have zero moving parts.

Consequently I've spec'd the system with an 866Mhz Pentium III CPU, although I was torn between the Intel PIII and the Via C3 Nehemiah 1Ghz, 256 MB PC133 ECC RAM, a fanless Zalman CNPS6000-Cu, see below, and a Compact Flash to IDE adapter for a 128MB CF read only file system.



I'm really impressed with the great maintainability inherent in Gentoo, and so I was planning on using Gentoo as a base for the router OS.

Catalyst is the tool that you'd use to build a Gentoo LiveCD, which is what my CF filesystem will be effectively, the info about Catalyst is here:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/catalyst/catalyst-howto.xml

Here's a more in depth howto covering the entire process:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Small_Footprint_Gentoo_on_USB

Distributed Site Hosting via Coral

Here's an interesting project which facilitated web site hosting distributed amongst several servers in a P2P system, it's called Coral:

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral

As an example, here's slashdot hosted via Coral:

http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/

You can inject any web site into the Coral network simply by prepending the URL "nyud.net:8090/" with the DNS that you want to inject, as I did above for Slashdot. You can also append a fully qualified URI to the end of the new DNS addressin order to host individual resources. Note that the standard anchors on the new hosted pages are rewritten so that they are directed to "*.nyud.net:8090/" also.

The DNS resolver will be automagically redirected to a Coral node which is geographically close to the client, so nyud.net will not actually cause a bottleneck.

$30 USB HD Enclosure

Here's a place that sells nice USB HD enclusures for just $30:

http://www.xpcgear.com/enclosures.html

SciTE

Today's useful tool is a multi language syntax highlighting editor called SciTE, which written to showcase SCIntilla , available from here:

http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html

Doxygen

I've been trying to remember the name of the very useful code documentor which produces JavaDoc-esq documentation plus UML diagrams for C++ code.

It's called Doxygen and it's available from here:

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html

VNC2SWF

I was looking for a free open source Shockwave Flash
demo generator and ran across VNC2SWF that "does
exactly what it says on the tin", it converts VNC
sessions to SWF videos. It's available from here:

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/

Dia to SQL

I've been trying to remember the name of the tool that
I'd found to convert Dia diagrams to SQL, and vice
versa.

I finally remembered a couple of minutes ago. It's
called tedia2sql and it's available from here:

http://tedia2sql.tigris.org

Phew!

Finally, I've gone and got a blog

Well, I finally went and got a blog.

I have decided that I have had enough. No more solving problems or arriving at ideas only to realise six months later that I have forgotten the solutions or what the ideas were.

Which leads me smoothly into my first solution; the means to host my own blog:

EasyMobblog at http://www.easymoblog.org

Hopefully I'll actually keep up with this... we'll see...