1 July, 2013
Over the next few weeks the software running on all the servers will be upgraded to Debian 7. This should be uneventful, insofar as users are concerned, but please let me know if you find something that isn't working as expected.
Update: ash has been upgraded. [2013-07-23]
Update: oak has been upgraded. [2013-08-22]
Update: The issue with authenticating to send emails from outside of the network has been fixed. [2013-08-27]
1 December, 2012
As planned, the waxworlds.org root certificate was changed today, to avoid it expiring. All service certificates have also been replaced for ones signed by the new root certificate. The new root certificate will expire in 2100, so I shouldn't need to replace it again any time soon.
29 November, 2012
Apologies to anyone having difficulty accessing waxworlds.org services (in particular, jabber and mail). Our service provider has had a routing problem since the early hours of this morning. See their fault status page for more information.
Update: The issue seems to have been fixed. [1pm]
25 November, 2012
Apologies to account holders trying to send email remotely. SMTP authentication (which has to be over SSL) wasn't working, but it is now.
Quick reminder: less than a week before the waxworlds.org root CA certificate changes.
The Arduino IDE is nice to get beginners started, but you’ll quickly hit its limitations. And if, like me, you found an option in the preferences dialogue that enables an external editor, you’ll have been disappointed to find that it seems only to disable the internal editor!
It is possible to work entirely outside the IDE, with your own editor (like Emacs or Eclipse) and build your projects from the command line (or in another IDE). Here’s one way to do it…
You should make sure that the Arduino IDE is working first. This will ensure the compiler, C-library an Arduino libraries are installed and working correctly and that you can communicate with your Arduino. Then you’ll want to use a Makefile. I’ve spent some time writing one, in collaboration with quite a few other people, an it’s available here. It’s very easy to use, quite fully-featured, and as compatible with the IDE as possible. (Other makefiles also exist, of course.)
OK, so to build your project outside the IDE, you’ll need to do the following:
Create yourself a `Makefile`, with the following in:
Obviously, you should replace `~/src/arduino.mk` with the location you saved the Aruino makefile. Having saved `Makefile`, you can run `make boards` to see what board names exist. Then, you should set the `BOARD` variable correctly (“uno” may not be correct).
And that’s it!
To build your project, you should only have to type
To upload it to the Arduino board, go
(If it can’t detect your Arduino by its self, you may need to set the SERIALDEV variable in your Makefile.)
And if you want to use the Serial Monitor from the Arduino IDE without running the IDE, you can achieve this by going
This actually runs GNU screen. (You’ll need to remember the shortcut keys to kill screen (^a k, by default) so that you can get out of it!)
If something goes wrong or isn’t working, you should have a look at the documentation for arduino.mk.
14 November, 2012
In September next year the root certificate that is used to sign all waxworlds.org certificates will expire. It will have to be replaced (along with all waxworlds.org certificates).
So, on 1st December (a couple of weeks time), I will be changing the root certificate. Or, more accurately, I will be replacing every waxworlds.org certificate with ones that are signed by a new root certificate.
You will need to have the new root certificate installed in your browsers, mail clients and wherever else you want to trust waxworlds.org SSL/TLS certificates. The new certificate is here:
Sorry for the inconvenience.
12 November, 2012
The whole of waxworlds.org has been dark since Sunday morning. This was the result of two factors.
Oak failed catastrophically at 7:52am on 11th November.
Since the recent migration (in June), the root nameservers have had the wrong IP address for ns2.waxworlds.org. So in the absence of oak, waxworlds.org wasn't resolving at all.
The DNS issue has been corrected.
Oak is now a brand new machine with a fresh OS install. As a consequence, there may be a few loose ends that aren't set up quite right. In particular, oak handles our mail, DNS, jabber and has web and database servers on it. I would appreciate being told about any issues that anyone notices.
Long live the new oak.
Many X applications allow you to specify geometry, like this:
Which is great. But it doesn’t let you specify what desktop you want the application to open on.
For a while, in GNOME 3, I used the Auto Move Windows extension, which moves all windows of a given application to a particular workspace. The limitation with this approach is that it affects all windows of a given application and can’t be specified per application launch (which is not so useful for, say, terminals!)
So I wrote a script to do what I wanted. You simply pass the script a desktop (which is a zero-based index) and the command to launch. E.g.:
Here’s the script. It works by launching the process then polling the X-server for any windows that are owned by that process 10 times a second for 10 seconds. If it finds one, it moves it to the specified workspace.
23 June, 2012
We are no longer accepting SSL connections on port 5223 to the jabber server. Jabber clients must use TLS on the usual jabber port, 5222. So, encryption is still required to connect to the jabber server.
The reason for the change is that port 5223, while commonly used, is not an
official jabber port. Since the recent server migration, we're now using DNS
SRV records to redirect jabber clients to im.waxworlds.org and no official
IANA-assigned service name exists for port 5223.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
21 June, 2012
Various services have been migrated to our new server, ash, which is to function primarily as a webserver.
Web
All hosted sites have now been moved to the new server. If there are any remaining problems, please let me know. Where user accounts don't contain an actual website, they have been left on oak and can now be accessed via oak.waxworlds.org (rather than www.waxworlds.org).
MySQL
The MySQL server is running locally on ash, as it did on oak. MySQL is still running on oak, if you need it, however most of the user data has been migrated.
DNS
Ash is now also one of our nameservers.
