mcld.co.uk

A while ago I had big problems with Demon broadband because they "upgraded" the service and made it incompatible with my router. After a bit of back-and-forth Demon kindly replaced the router with a newer one, a "Thomson TG585 v7". It works fine.

While trying to get our radio station back online and streaming, I discovered something dodgy about the router setup, so if you happen to have one of these routers then do this check described below, to make sure your router's admin page isn't exposed to the world. I have to thank the very helpful people on the portforward.com forums who spotted the issue (thread here, with more details).

(1) Connect to the router's admin interface using telnet. On my Mac I do this by launching Terminal and typing telnet 192.168.254.254 (then giving the username and password when prompted).

(2) Type config dump (and press return) and a massive massive screed of text will appear, listing all the config settings for the device.

(3) In that text, look for a subsection labelled [ servmgr.ini ] (for me it was near the bottom). Check to see if these lines are in that bit:

    ifadd name=HTTP group=wan
    ifadd name=TELNET group=wan

The important thing here is "wan". "lan" is OK, it means you can have local access to the admin, but "wan" is dodgy because it means you're providing an opportunity for the world to access your router.

(4) If you do have those lines then you can fix the situation by running the following commands (the final one will reboot your router):

    service system ifdelete name HTTP group wan
    service system ifdelete name TELNET group wan
    saveall
    system reboot

Voila. After rebooting you may wish to go through the steps again to check that the config settings have been changed.

Someone I know is setting up a wordpress website, and wanted to use an imagemap to put links in the header image. It's tricky, because the default template uses an image as background not foreground, and you can't use an imagemap with that.

Here's a quick hack for making it possible: Find the file /wp-content/themes/default/header.php and open it in a text editor. Near the end of that file you'll find the h1 element where the heading is printed. The block looks like this:

<div id="header" role="banner">
    <div id="headerimg">
        <h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
        <div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
    </div>
</div>

The quick hack is to change it like this:

<div id="header" role="banner" style="background-image: none !important;">
    <div id="headerimg">
        <h1 style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
            <img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/mynewimage.png" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" id="_Image-Maps_3200907261653144"  usemap="#Image-Maps_3200907261653144" />
        </h1>
        <map id="_Image-Maps_3200907261653144" name="Image-Maps_3200907261653144">
            <area shape="rect" coords="32,20,234,188" href="http://www.parpface.com/" alt="go to parpface" title="go to parpface"    />
        </map>
    </div>
</div>

There are four changes:

• I added some CSS in that first line to stop the background image from showing.
• I added an img tag inside the h1 tag to show my image
• I added some CSS to the h1 tag to stop it having a big empty border
• I added the image map - i.e. the map tag and all that

That's pretty hacky but it seems to work.

Our Demon broadband service has been good for years, but over the past few weeks it's been really bad. We have had the same wifi router for ages (a D-Link) and it's been reliable, but in recent weeks the ADSL service has cut out completely, three or four times per day.

The wifi is still working (I can communicate from one local computer to another) but the connection to the outside (in either direction) is totally gone, and the "ADSL" light on the router is flashing indicating a problem. I can "solve" the problem by rebooting the router, but rebooting the router three or four times a day is completely impractical and a right pain - and, of course, 100% impossible if I'm away from home and trying to log in remotely.

(I'm actually having problems posting this blog article, since my connection only lasts about two or three minutes at a time this evening. Have rebooted router five times while writing this post. Cor blimey this is a bad service....)

I rang Demon customer service and I could tell I wasn't the only one having the problem - they've recently added a message saying "if you're having broadband problems try rebooting your router before ringing". I see from a recent news article that it is definitely affecting lots of people.

The first thing Demon told me to do was move my router so it was plugged into the main landline socket (not an extension) and try changing the microfilter. So eventually I found the kit for that and did it, but the problems were exactly the same.

Then I rang back, spent another 45 minutes waiting for an answer from the tech support, and after going through the same questions, the only thing they could tell me was "buy a new router". Hmm, so if the problem is that my router is crap, how come everyone's having the exact same problem as me, all at the same time? Everyone's router has broken at once? Not particularly likely. Apparently Demon have done some kind of "upgrade" to their broadband service, the details of which I don't know, but it looks like something might have gone badly wrong with that because lots of people seem to be having the same problem as me - a service that worked perfectly well and pretty much rock-solid for five years is now "upgraded" to a totally awful state.

IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS: First reboot the router - turn it off, wait 20 seconds, turn it on. If you have the same as me (rebooting fixes it but not for long), try making sure your router is plugged into the primary landline wall socket (with no extension cables), and try changing the microfilter. Tech support will refuse to help you until you do those steps. Then if you ring tech support, they might say that your router must be faulty and try a different one. I certainly don't know of a wifi router I can borrow. But if everyone is having the same problem then it isn't our routers that are at fault but Demon's service.

• Update: problems fixed with a new router sent by Demon - thanks

We've been thinking about how best to incorporate multicore processing into SuperCollider's audio engine. A bit of background: the trend in computing is that although computers used to have one single CPU to do all the thinking, the latest computers tend to have multiple CPUs (each with access to shared memory). Furthermore, it's now even possible to make use of the number-crunching power lying unused on many graphics chips - although that doesn't use the same shared memory so it's a slightly different situation.

This all means that most software, which runs on an "old-fashioned" single-core model, might not be using the full power available. There are libraries available to help programmers easily move into this multicore world, such as the well-established and very easy-to-use OpenMP.

How does OpenMP work? It's very much like a traditional threading model, where if you want multiple things to happen at once, you launch as many separate "threads" as you need. OpenMP simplifies this by automatically creating the threads as needed (e.g. it can automatically parallellise the separate iterations of a for-loop), and also by automatically distributing the threads over the CPUs. It's often called a "fork-and-join" model: when the program reaches a block of code which could be parallellised, it divides itself up into many parallel threads - and then when the parallel bit is over, the program logic all joins back to the single thread that started it all.

With real-time audio processing there's a complication. We want the software to take some chunks of input audio (if used), do some processing, and create some chunks of output audio, all within a very tight timeframe. This has a few implications:

• Performing a fork-and-join procedure at every audio "block", typically around a hundred times a second, is expensive in computer effort. I know because I tried it, and a highly efficient sine-wave generator suddenly became extremely heavy...
• Multicore programming libraries often don't guarantee how fast they will do their job. Plus, there's an overhead involved in dividing tasks up. Plus, there may be added overhead because of the very nature of parallel processing (e.g. transferring data from main memory to GPU memory). All of which means that certain interesting-looking APIs (e.g. GPGPU systems such as Nvidia's CUDA; Apple's Grand Central) are unlikely to be particularly helpful for realtime audio.
• More prosaically, my experiments find that CoreAudio (the Mac audio infrastructure) and OpenMP don't play well together, which is a shame - makes it harder for anyone trying to parallellise audio software on Mac. Luckily I didn't have this problem on Linux.

So the question remains. Do we want to make our realtime audio apps multicore, and if so, how? You don't always improve things by spreading them over more cores, because of the inherent overheads I mentioned. However, on an 8-core system it certainly seems a shame to be limited to a maximum of 1/8 of the computer's thinking power.

SuperCollider has a nice aspect which helps here. The audio engine ("scsynth") is a separate application, and you can have multiple instances. So you could quite easily launch multiple audio engines, and have each one of them handle different parts of your audio scene. Great - nice and easy - although with some limitations. The different audio engine instances wouldn't be able to share memory, so sharing data between them is a bit of a pain. Also, it seems that you can't really guarantee which CPU core is used to run which process (the "affinity") - typically they would tend to be distributed over the cores, but it'd be nicer if we could guarantee that.

So, an approach to within-process parallellisation? Maybe we need to launch a thread for each core, and have these threads do a kind of busy-waiting until the audio callback wants some work to be done. Busy-waiting would be hard to get right though, compromising between responsiveness and CPU cycles wasted on the active waiting.

I just installed Ubuntu Studio 9.04 as dual-boot on my Mac and it's fantastic. Pretty much everything works out of the box, soundcard support, low-latency realtime audio, etc. (The only problem I had was a mild annoyance with my wacom tablet, bug 375329.)

Since I want to use jack as my audio subsystem, I launched "JACK Control" (aka "qjackctrl") from the applications menu and pressed its "Start" button. Then I was ready to make sound.

Installing SuperCollider was super-easy too: I installed SuperCollider from the packages at http://launchpad.net/~supercollider/+archive/ppa and scvim worked straight from its little menu icon.

Darn it, this is easy

(A rough indication of performance: on this dual-core Intel Mac, 2GHz, I can generate 1000 sinewaves in SuperCollider (random freq between 100 and 1000 Hz), at 44.1kHz and with jack's buffer size left at its default of 1024, with a comfortable DSP load of 76% on one of the cores. There are no audio dropouts even if I do some big compiling tasks etc - they naturally get assigned to the other core, of course.)

I've been working on Self-Organising Maps for timbre analysis, and I needed a good way to make an interactive 3D plot of the SOMs so that I could visually verify what was going on. ... Actually it took me a while trying out a few options, to get something decent in place. That's why I'm documenting it here.

• Of course Matlab has some good scientific 3D plotting, and I did a couple of preliminary visualisations using that. However, it's not open-source, it doesn't dovetail particularly nicely with SuperCollider (which is where my data is coming from), and it is a bit of a behemoth and I don't want it installed on my tiny Linux Eee PC.
• GNU Octave is pretty much an open-source clone of Matlab (it aims for language compatibility). It provides some basic matlabby plotting but lacks a lot of the advanced control, and also some features such as patch() are missing, which I needed.
• My number 1 hunch was that Python, with its popular scientific modules, would have some powerful 3D plotting right there. However, the standard matlab-like plotting module matplotlib doesn't have any 3D support. There's also something called mayavi which I think does OpenGL-based fancy 3D graphics, but I couldn't get it installed on my Mac so I couldn't test it out. I was really surprised not to be able to get very far with python and scientific 3D.
• Someone reminded me about scilab - silly of me to forget this one; it's a long-standing open-source science platform with visualisation tools, I bet it could have helped.

And here's the solution I finally settled on:

• gnuplot, plus the GNUPlot quark to be able to use it directly within SuperCollider. Gnuplot has a nice diversity of plotting styles available from its scripting language, and in the end it was surprisingly simple to script it to build what I wanted: 3D surface plots with little lines sticking out, representing the mapping from datapoints onto the SOM. It took me a while to understand that it's not oriented towards inline data: it gets much easier if you drop your data into a text file (CSV or suchlike) and work from that.

Here's an example of some test data which I piped straight from SuperCollider into gnuplot:

it works!

For those of you freaked out by yesterday's thing where my fridge could turn off my laptop's sound, here's an update. It seems it's somehow due to my amp.

With the exact same setup, but listening on headphones rather than the amp, the fridge has no more power over my computer. My amp is old (1970s? no idea) and so I'm not surprised, but it's still a mystery how the chain of events occurs. Somehow, the glitch needs to propagate through the chain, fridge->amp->audiointerface->laptop, in such a way that the laptop gets a bad file descriptor error which makes the audio fall over.

Here's the full error message, in case it matters to anyone:

ALSA: prepare error for playback on "hw:1,1" (File descriptor in bad state)
DRIVER NT: could not run driver cycle
jack caught main signal 12
no message buffer overruns

Today I've been trying to work out why the sound on my Eee sometimes stops working. I've narrowed it down to one slightly surprising cause: the fridge! I can leave the audio (SuperCollider via jackd) running absolutely fine for three-quarters of an hour, fine... and then the fridge's thermostat kicks in, turning the fridge on - and at the exact same moment the audio stops!

I know that the fridge emits some kind of radio interference when the thermostat kicks in/out, since it always disrupts the Freeview TV signal for a fraction of a second. So how would that affect the sound on my Eee PC?

1. First suspect: wifi activity. Maybe some kind of weird wifi reaction is triggered by the fridge's outburst, and the computer's response to that trips up the audio. But I can turn off the wifi and it still happens. (That doesn't completely rule it out - maybe the wireless card still does something weird, even if the system isn't trying to maintain any wireless connections.)
2. Second suspect: a blip in the AC power supply. It's quite likely that the fridge kicking in/out warps the mains electricity in our little place, and maybe the computer reacts badly to that. No, doesn't seem so, since it happens even if the Eee is running on battery power.
3. Third suspect: is it possible that the fridge's radio outburst does something to the USB connection between the Eee and the audio interface? I'm not sure exactly - seems less likely than the other two candidates, to me. I haven't yet tried to make the glitch to occur while using system built-in audio rather than the audio interface.

Well it's a strange case and I haven't solved it yet. Turning off the fridge while using my computer would be a bit of a hassle...

• Update: It's the amp

Having benchmarked different ways to zero an array, there's also the question of copying lumps of floating-point data from one place to another, which can be done in a similar range of different ways. Here I've benchmarked in the same way as in my first note, using the analogous approach in each case (except for method 9, which doesn't have an analogue here):

Method	Mac PPC	Linux Intel
1, sc3	21 %	69 %
2, for, array	40 %	75 %
3, for, post	38 %	51 %
4, for, pre	38 %	75 %
5, do-while	39 %	75 %
6, duff's, post	40 %	56 %
7, duff's, pre	40 %	75 %
8, memcpy	13 %	39 %
10, unrolled-for	39 %	47 %

(This shows results for copying aligned blocks of data. I also did a test using unaligned blocks, there are no differences worth reporting.)

For PPC Mac it's a very consistent story: all of the loopy methods basically take exactly the same amount of effort. JMC's crafty use of doubles is a clever optimisation here, but (as in the zeroing test) there's a definite outright winner, and it's simpler: memcpy.

For Intel Linux there's some variation in the results. For some reason postincremented pointers are better than their alternatives, and the unrolling in method 10 helps noticeably. But again, memcpy is the outright winner.

So it looks like the recommendation is a direct parallel of the first test: memcpy() please, in this kind of circumstance. YMMV.

On the SuperCollider developer list we were discussing what was the most efficient way to set a block of floating-point data to zero. So I've run a test... here's the results.

I wrote a plugin which repeatedly clears a block of 512 floating-point values by calling SuperCollider's Clear() macro, and then ran 10 of these plugins in a synth. By changing what happens inside the macro I could test different approaches, and see the CPU load in each case.

This shows the different ways that I used to clear the data:

// (1) SuperCollider's old code, hand-optimised for powerpc.
//   requires 8-byte alignment, annoyingly.
if ((numSamples & 1) == 0) {
    double *outd = (double*)out - ZOFF;
    LOOP(numSamples >> 1, ZXP(outd) = 0.; );
} else {
    out -= ZOFF;
    LOOP(numSamples, ZXP(out) = 0.f; );
}

// (2) for-loop method using array indexing:
int i;
for(i = 0; i < numSamples; ++i)
    out[i] = 0.f;

// (3) for-loop method using pointer postincrement:
int i;
float *loc = out;
for(i = 0; i < numSamples; ++i)
    *(loc++) = 0.f;

// (4) for-loop method using pointer preincrement:
int i;
float *loc = out - 1;
for(i = 0; i < numSamples; ++i)
    *(++loc) = 0.f;

// (5) a do-while loop:
int i = numSamples;
do{
    out[--i] = 0.f;
}while(i != 0);

// (6) a duff's device using pointer postincrement:
float *loc = out;
DUFF_DEVICE_8(numSamples, *(loc++)=0.f;);

// (7) a duff's device using pointer preincrement:
float *loc = out - 1;
DUFF_DEVICE_8(numSamples, *(++loc)=0.f;);

// (8) memset'ing the data to a char value of zero:
memset(out, 0, numSamples * sizeof(float));

// (9) bzero, which sets character data to a value of zero:
bzero(out, numSamples * sizeof(float));

// (10) for-loop method using pointers and manual unrolling:
int i;
float *loc = out;
for(i = numSamples >> 2; i != 0; --i){ // Unroll into blocks of four
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
}
// These two "if"s handle the remainder, if not divisible exactly by four
if(numSamples & 1){
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
}
if(numSamples & 2){
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
    *(loc++) = 0.f;
}

These methods come in two groups: the semantically-correct ones (the for-loops and do-loops, plus the Duff's device) which treat a float as a float; and the hacky ones (memset, bzero, the double-trick) which make use of our knowledge that the binary representation will turn out to be the same. The C/C++ standards don't guarantee that the binary representation will be the same, so some would say these are dangerous approaches. However, the IEEE floating-point standards specify that all-zero-bits equates to zero, so on any machine using IEEE floating-point then this is definitely OK.

And these are the two systems I tested on:

• Mac OSX 10.4.11, 1 GHz PPC G4
• Asus Eee, Xandros Linux, 900 MHz Intel clocked at 630 MHz

Compiled the plugin using ordinary (non-debug) compiler settings from SuperCollider build scripts (on Mac this uses -Os, on Linux -O3). Results:

Method	Mac PPC	Linux Intel
1, sc3	67 %	58 %
2, for, array	31 %	75 %
3, for, post	31 %	51 %
4, for, pre	73 %	75 %
5, do-while	32 %	74 %
6, duff's, post	35 %	56 %
7, duff's, pre	31 %	48 %
8, memset	11 %	44 %
9, bzero	11 %	44 %
10, unrolled for	32 %	51 %

Some surprises here. One is how much more efficient memset/bzero is than other standard methods. (The optimising compiler converts memset to bzero on my machines, which is why their results are the same.)

Also the strong inefficiency of the preincrementing for-loop method. It's possible that the compiler automatically converts some types of loop into a Duff's device, which would explain why there's a strange pattern of fastness and slowness in the standard loops with the Duff's device as a lower limit on their efficiency. The manual unrolling (method 10) is no help either!

SC's method seems poor on both systems, despite apparently being designed for ppc. (The original author has indeed said that the code in that header-file is getting out-of-date...)

I read that bzero is nonstandard so it would look like one good way to proceed, and pretty easy to do, is to use memset(), but keep in mind that you might not be able to use it on systems with non-IEEE fp.

These graphs show the results for different data sizes, within the range we most care about for SC:

Mac, Intel Core Duo	Mac, PPC G4	Intel Linux (Eee)

Note that each graph is produced with a different number of parallel UGens - I had to push it up to 500 to get significant CPU usage on the Core Duo! The clear tendency over all three graphs is for memset to have the edge, although there's some interesting alternation in the Core Duo graph.

Reminder of the two important rules: (1) take all benchmarks with a big pinch of salt; (2) don't optimise until you can prove that you should do. These benchmarks are specific to UGen plugins running in SuperCollider, YMMV.

I've redesigned my homepage, it is now 100 times cooler. Let me know what you think...

www.mcld.co.uk

Thanks to Jan Trutzschler von Falkenstein, Rain Rabbit, Samuel Craven and Gregorio Karman for the wicked photos.

There's a "pdftk" thing that provides a command-line "pdf merge" tool, but it won't install on my Mac for boring reasons. I found this tip which gives a commandline way to do it without installing anything:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf \ source1.pdf source2.pdf source3.pdf etc.pdf

Handy

Last weekend I had a mini-calamity when someone poured a bottle of ale all over my tiny little Eee laptop (while it was still plugged in, it was having a bit of a rest from music-making). Dried it off etc but found out the next day that three of the keys were half-stuck down, which made it really difficult to use. They'd presumably got some sticky dried-out beer deposit in the keyboard contacts.

After a bit of prompting I took the plunge and discovered that you can pop the keyboard off by flipping three little tabs (there's a video here). Then, online advice told me to give the keyboard a soak in either: (1) ethanol (70% or more), (2) isopropanol (70% or more), or (3) deionised water. (Never use meths or acetone. If water, it has to be deionised so that it doesn't leave deposits which may harm the electronics.)

I couldn't find any of the chemicals so I had to use de-ionised water in the end, which I got from Robert Dyas. I soaked the affected bit of the keyboard (the top) for about 8 hours, then dried it off thoroughly by pointing a cool hairdryer at it for a couple of hours, then left it out overnight to dry more.

And hey presto it seems to have worked. I'm writing this now from my revived Eee...

Last.fm provides data feeds of what you've been listening to recently. But they don't give you a feed for the full list of things you've ever listened to. So I wrote a shell script (a bash script) which should run on Mac/Linux, to archive the XML feed data for me:

• lastfmarchive.bash - see also details page with some instructions

To archive the data regularly, you need to set this up to run often, e.g. using cron.

On Mac OSX, the default thing that happens when you click a PDF link in Safari is that it is displayed, quickly and efficiently, with the "Preview" tool.

Unfortunately, if you download and install Adobe's own "Reader" software, it changes Safari's behaviour to use the crap slow-loading slow-displaying Adobe tool instead. Granted, it can do some other things like PDF forms, but for most PDFs it just gets in the way.

I couldn't find out from the web how to remove this behaviour without uninstalling the Reader (which you need to have around sometimes), but I worked it out, so here's how - just delete this file from your hard drive: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

I'm thinking about practicalities of setting myself up in my new PhD position, and one of the things to think about (since I'll be doing a lot of computer work) is how to set up the Mac I'll be using. So, largely for my own reference but for anyone else, here's my list of the really really useful software to install on a Mac. Most of these items are free so the whole lot costs very little.

Things to install on a Mac

The first lot allow you to install a whole range of excellent Unix software, so I install them before (almost) anything else. But skip over this bit if you're not into Unix software:

• Apple's Developer Tools (comes on a separate CD along with your OSX installer discs)
• X11 (I think it also comes on the same disc as the developer tools.) X11 is a way for open-source software to create graphical interfaces (windows, menus, etc)
• Fink (depends on Dev Tools)
• Darwinports (depends on Dev Tools)

Now the really essential software:

• Audacity - the best audio editor.
• BBEdit - a high-performance HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Excellent for programming but also just for opening text files etc. (NB not free)
• iDefrag - defragments your hard disk, improving your computer's performance. (NB not free)
• JDiskReport - excellent graphical way to see what's on your hard disk, what's taking up all the space, etc.
• Firefox - I like Safari a lot, but it's often helpful to have Firefox too.
• Firefox Web Developer toolbar
• Fetch - the nicest FTP software I ever did see. (NB not free)
• Thunderbird - I don't like Apple's Mail software. Thunderbird does newsfeeds as well as email, and gives you lots and lots of control.

Then there's good software but not essential:

• Chicken of the VNC - for accessing remote desktops
• Gimp for image editing. Not Photoshop but near enough, and free
• WriteRoom - minimalist writing environment for people who need to concentrate
• Google Earth - sometimes you just need to look at the planet
• Jreepad - store all the notes you ever think of in a sprawling tree-like structure
• MenuCalendarClock for iCal - really valuable little tool which gives instant access to your calendar. (NB not free)
• Growl - allows applications to send you unobtrusive notifications. You can get iTunes to flash up what tracks it's playing, among many many other applications.
• Coriolis CDMaker - Comes free with iDefrag, and lets you create bootable CDs for rescuing your computer when (in two or three years' time) something goes completely wrong...

Audio things

These are essential for me. If you're into music/audio they may be essential for you too:

• SuperCollider - programming language and environment for sound.
• Audio Hijack Pro - allows you to grab the audio from any application and record it to disk. Useful in so many ways. (NB not free)
• Tartini - a beautifully useable tool "designed as a practical analysis tool for singers and instrumentalists", giving highly detailed pitch contours.
• VLC - media player.
• MPlayer - media player.
• SPEAR - spectral analysis of sounds.

The geeky section

Some useful unix tools I install from fink:

• svn-client-ssl (this is needed to install SuperCollider from current source)

Useful command-line things I install from darwinports:

• wireshark (neat tool for sniffing on network connections and seeing what's going on)
• lame (library for creating MP3s)

I searched the web for IE7 and found this helpful website about Internet Explorer 7. Nice...

The Internet Archive is a wonderful project, but I'm a little worried that they aren't learning the lesson of successes like Flickr.

The Internet Archive's mission is to preserve as much as possible of the internet (including images, movies, music) in a reliable long-term storage system. It's an excellent plan, run with a librarian's approach which is missing from many internet startups. These startups and their customers are generating lots of fantastic information, but I don't think there's any attempt to preserve this data for future generations.

Anyway. One lesson from Flickr is that their success is largely due to the ability for people to embed Flickr photo collections into their own websites, blogs, etc. They have features such as being able to access your Flickr collection as an RSS feed. The Internet Archive has nothing like this. There is the Ourmedia project, which is a nice project about putting a friendly and social interface onto the Internet Archive, but not much for the existing range of excellent content stored at archive.org.

Here's something which I hope might help: I've created a tool which transforms an archive.org search into an RSS feed. Feedback welcome. It's only a start, but I hope that tools like this could make it possible for archive.org's content to spread outwards throughout the internet. Let's turn the biggest online public archive into a lending library!

Phew! I've just managed to work out how to get my PowerBook on the internet, by connecting over FireWire through my iMac. The iMac's ethernet port is taken (by my girlfriend's PC), and it has no wireless capability, so I needed to work out a simple way to get online. Mac OSX computers can network over a Firewire cable, so I connected a cable between the two, but I was encountering major headaches trying to get on the web. Or even to anything as simple as connecting from one computer to another using SSH or ping.

Here's what you (probably) need to do: on the computer with the internet connection, make sure internet sharing is enabled for "Built-in FireWire" (look in System Preferences > Sharing > Internet). Then go to the Network Preferences and set up your Firewire network connection as using "DHCP with manual address", and type in a normal "local" IP address such as "10.0.1.7". On the other computer, go to the Network Preferences and make sure "Built-in FireWire" is enabled, and make sure the connection is using "DHCP" for connecting.

I couldn't seem to get the internet sharing to work without running a proxy server, so I also run tinyproxy on my iMac, and in the PowerBook's Network Preferences I make sure it's set up to use the proxy.

From what I've read, I'm inferring that in order for the two Macs to talk to each other (using Bonjour/Rendezvous), they both need to be using DHCP. This may or may not be true, but it's my conclusion for today. On top of which, I need a fixed IP address for my main computer since otherwise the other computer won't be able to find its proxy host.