Denis Lemire's Site

The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

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Almost a week short of two years ago I ported Motorola’s CNUT tool to OS X. I originally did so to satisfy my personal use but also decided to share the package for others who fall into the tiny niche of being responsible for the administration of Canopy networks and wanting to use OS X to do so.

As my need lessened for such a package due to a change in positions and responsibilities, the package was neglected shortly after. Although the original package still works, Canopy firmware 9.0 and later require the use of CNUT 3.x.

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The AirSurfer WISP network I manage for Triton Networking Solutions Ltd. utilizes hundreds of Motorola Canopy Subscriber modules to connect individual broadband clients to our network.

In order to mass manage these devices, Motorola provides CNUT. CNUT is a great tool, but in spite of the fact that it was written in cross platform languages from day one (Currently Java, previously some Perl in the mix for good measure) it is only packaged for Windows and Linux systems.

I’ve been dissatisfied for some time in the exclusion of support for CNUT on my desktop OS of choice. Being in a creative and inspired mood late yesterday evening, I did what any self respecting, Canopy using, red blooded, vigilante coding network geek would do.

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When designing web sites, squeezing your design down to as few kilobytes as possible is a critical operation to keep your site responsive to visitors with low-bandwidth internet connections.

In a well designed web site, markup is almost insignificant in size relative to the image files that make up a visually rich presentation. In order to create image files that are as tiny as possible, I use Ken Silverman‘s PNGOUT utility.

While PNGOUT serves my purposes very well, it has two flaws:

1. No batch operation
2. No support for FreeBSD

Fortunately, I can do something to address the first issue.

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