Advogato blog for DarkBlack

17 May 2001

Thu, 17 May 2001 18:49:38 GMT

New release of GtkX10 out today. This incorporated a nice hack to allow for configurable labels for the buttons.

I started using CVS for my web projects at work the other day. It has already proven itself in usefulness. I am sold on using it for the web.

13 May 2001

Sun, 13 May 2001 06:15:56 GMT

Wow, it has been a while indeed. Well, school has been over for a week, and I have been digging into several projects for work that have to be completed this summer.

We're looking into replacing the Proprietary Mail and Web Filter software with free software alternatives due to better features and greater stability. This will require some fun hacks to get the conversion done. User Mailboxes will be converted from a weird mbox style format to maildir format. Users will be pulled out of the existing system and imported into and LDAP backend. A simplified Administration Interface will be written using PHP. Users will then be able to get mail and proxy access with unified passwords and logins. This really will be fun.

Meanwhile, I'll be using the summer to dig deeper into the KDE Libraries that I have been playing around with lately. They really are an elegant set of libraries. I am hoping to continue with some of the projects that I started on last fall, now that several of the components that I needed to be more stable are getting mature.

17 Sep 2000

Sun, 17 Sep 2000 15:50:18 GMT

Well, I have finally gotten new parts for my desktop system. A new ASUS P3V4X Board, 128M RAM, PIII 733, and a Voodoo5.

It definitely is not the same computer as it once was. New Hard drive is on it's way.

Pulled out my old Metallica CD's and have been into that for some strange reason. Maybe it's that I am feeling old a little before I think that I should.

I'm currently debating on names for the school student management software. Hopefully something will stike me soon.

6 Sep 2000

Wed, 6 Sep 2000 13:11:54 GMT

I've been away for a while. I've been away from the Net for a while at that.

School is back in session and dealing with the sheer volume of work has been a task in and of itself. However, the weekend provided me with time for reflection and time to relax.

To begin my shock of coming back on to the Net after a few days, I am very happy to hear that Qt is now available under the GPL. While I am normally a GNOME user, I am currently testing out KDE under Debian. I will be happy to finally get KDE from "Official" sources. Ivan has done a wonderful job of keeping builds up to date.

Well, as a revisit to the Linux in Schools article a few days back, I have joined the SEUL/edu mailing list and have been discussing the possibility of starting a full blown student management/scheduling/attendace suite.

Most of my X programming has been done via GTK+/GNOME. With the size of this new project encompassing an entire school district, it will need cross-platform compatibility. This alone will complicate things alot. I have been looking, now that Qt is GPL, at building the application with it.

I am very impressed with the new KDE. That just shows how impressed that I am. It's quick. It's still a little quirky, but hey, it's a beta. It's very good for a beta.

Well, back to work.

26 Jul 2000

Wed, 26 Jul 2000 04:24:41 GMT

Well, It's coming together finally. I spent most of the weekend painting and cleaning. My bedroom ceiling and walls have been painted and the carpet has been cleaned.

I have been cleaning up the HD of my desktop system by moving important but usually unaltered info onto Zip Disks. Speaking of the desktop, it's definitely time to consider a new motherboard, processor and memory. Everything else can wait for a little longer. The P200 has just about had it.

I have recently picked up an interest in the SEUL/EDU project. I may be starting a project aimed at school accounting. I have found that most software designed for use in a school system is mostly crap. You would not believe the crap that is sold for thoiusands of dollars to school systems every where.

For example, the accounting software that we currently have was coded in M$ FoxPro and has the most horrible interface. The app can crash very easily because the code has hard-coded window positions. So if you set your resolution to 800x600 on some machines the app crashes with an error stating that the window would be off the screen. The whole program looks like it was thrown together in a couple day's time. It's really that bad.

If you want a nice laugh, check out the companies web site and even check out the demo: EPES Software.

Well, I am going to end it there for now. I will continue this later.

21 Jul 2000

Fri, 21 Jul 2000 02:30:49 GMT

I have been reading Geeks by Jon Katz. I have not been a big fan of Katz in the past, but I have really enjoyed this book. It is so easy to get absorbed by the lives of the two geeks and relate their experiences to my own.

I will go back and re-read some of his articles on Slashdot and think about them more closely.

As a side note, the decision has come down that we will be replacing our Netware 5 servers with Linux/Samba servers the next time around. Our Netware Admin is fed up with the horrible problems in upgrading our Netware 4.11 servers to version 5.

I personally like the way NDS works. I really think that Novell should really consider opening up the source for NDS. I will be a little sad to see it go. However, Admining Linux boxen via ssh should be no problem. I would actually prefer that method.

16 Apr 2000

Sun, 16 Apr 2000 04:26:46 GMT

Worked today on setting up a socks5 proxy on a Solaris machine. This box was purchased as a turn-key system, but they really don't know how to set it up! Tools were in an obscure directory - not in /usr/local.

Definitely going to have to put some GNU tools on this thing and straighten up that directory structure. The socks5 server would not compile on the darned thing!

In the user land today, some lady tried to switch two computers who were sharing printers and couldn't understand why she couldn't print to any of the printers anymore!

*sigh*

23 Jul 2000

Sun, 23 Jul 2000 05:02:06 GMT

Tried using several GNOME Applications in LANG=fr_FR today. I noticed that there are a lot of phrases that can't be translated easily into frech or probably many other languages either. Mental not to self: Make sure to write easily translatable strings.

29 Feb 2000

Tue, 29 Feb 2000 18:39:27 GMT

Today I am reading through the balsa source code and bug hunting.

Did homework for class