Older blog entries for RoUS (starting at number 49)

ante-meridian, EDT

SourceForge rant
Well, SourceForge closing one of my problem reports without resolution kicked me into posting an Advogato article about the issue. Bah..

B5
Taped the new Babylon 5 movie ('Legend of the Rangers', I think) for a friend last night. I always programme the VCR to start five minutes before air-time, and stop at least five minutes after the published end-time. I was taping at SP quality, and this would be the first time I've found a tape with less than 130 minutes on it.. It ran out of tape and shut off about two minutes before the end of the programme. Fortunately SciFi ran it again immediately, so I was able to scramble another tape in and record it (at EP this time -- quality be buggered). So I'll give him two tapes to-day, and tell him, "Watch this one up to the first advert, and then pop it out and pop this one in to watch the rest." Buggrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!

ante-meridian (quite), EDT

on capitalism
nymia wrote:

This is the thing I like about capitalism, it simply works.

I suspect there are some people in Argentina with differing opinions. :-(

on hardware
I'm finally shifting most of my laptop operations over to the new ThinkPad T21 I bought in September 2001. It has shown a troubling tendency to hang, however -- first the display (magic sysrq seems to get out of that), then a really hard hang that requires power cycling. Right now I'm trying a workaround with a 'Option ShadowStatus' line in my XF86Config file. The 600E that belongs to the company has been running continuously for months; I'd likewise prefer not to be forced to reboot the new one at random intervals. Just added the option yesterday, so it's too soon to tell if it has fixed the problem.

on VMware
I've got VMware installed on my Linux laptop, with a Win2K guest OS. It simply rocks. It doesn't rock perfectly (The Sims can't access the CD/DVD at the low level it wants in order to 'validate' me as a registered user, and the LEGO(tm) Mindstorms 1.5 system can't seem to properly download the RCX through the VMware->Linux->serial port pathway), but it's excellent natheless. At least it's good enough for my main purposes, which is parallel building of Apache on Linux and Windows so I can do the research for my books.

testing, testing.. 1, 2, 3..
Another thing that rocks is the Apache Perl regression test framework. It's excellent for Apache module development, though it's more than a little difficult to wrap your mind around the how-to aspect unless you're a Perl guru or have futzed with the CPAN testing stuff in the past. But if you can express a module's desired behaviour through tests for correctness, you can verify the code progress quickly and automagically. I'm adding sections about it, and sample tests, to my Apache modules book.

ante-meridian, EDT

huh? what?
I haven't had a lot to report in the last couple of months, so I didn't report it. But now I do, and I am.

spackle
A few weeks ago my group ran into an odd problem with our CVS repository: people's diff commit messages were getting entangled. The repository was correct, it was just the mail messages that were sometimes combined. The culprit? An invalid assumption of uniqueness for file naming: the logging script used getpgrp() to form a unique ID for the patch cluster. That works, usually, but not here. See, this repository (being private) was being updated through pserver, and the getpgrp() was always returning the info about inetd's pgrp. Fixed this by generating an MD5 hash of the one constant for a patch cluster, the log message, and using that for the unique ID instead. If you're using the log_accum.pl script from the Apache repository, or any of the others where I've installed it over the years (like Jikes), you're susceptible to this pserver-only bug.

Versionary
Some minor tweaks in here, still pre-alpha. Be more forthcoming about the cause of 'n files here, but none matched the current tag ()' messages -- by reporting missing apps right up front. Also started prototyping correct handling of read-only repositories..

obOpenMouth
I hadn't heard anything from the NordU2002 people about my travel arrangements, so I pinged them yesterday. This morning my mailbox contained a message: 'Oh, there must have been a misunderstanding; make your own travel arrangements and we'll reimburse you after the conference.' Bzzzzt! Not the conditions under which I agreed to go. I don't do 'reimbursement' of airfare or lodging any more; I've been stiffed too many times. Whomever's inviting me gets to pre-pay or direct-bill those. I'm sure not about to put myself in a position to have to eat the cost of a trans-Atlantic flight, even with fares cheaper than they used to be.. I Cced everyone involved on my response, so hopefully they'll get a clew and stick by their original commitment.

post-meridian, EST

obOpen-ness
[No, that's not the anyone-can-play plumbing of the depths of Loch Ness.] Woo-hoo! Released spackle's first alpha to-day! It'll probably break any CVS repository to which it's applied, but that's why it's an alpha and not a beta. :-)

very post-meridian, EST

ApacheRant
mjcox invited me to rant on Apache Week every now and then. Heh-heh. Well, he asked for it. I've rambled a couple of times so far..

obOpenSource
Got some motivation to do a bunch of work on Spackle to-day. The ./configure at least does something useful, even if not complete. Should be ready for a 0.1 release in a few more hours' work..

post-meridian, EDT

obOpenMouth
Well, I'm on the slate to yackity-yack at NordU2002 in Helsinki in February. I'm gonna talk about Synergy in Open Commercialism or some such; at any rate, the middle ground between closed/proprietary software and the militant openness of the GPL.

obOpenSource
Made some progress on Spackle; added the ability to direct the CVS commit messages to different addresses based on a regex match of the files/modules changed. There's still a weirdness interacting with SourceForge's default CVS configuration; there are.. issues.. with a project that frobs the CVS admin files when the repository is on someone else's server. :-D

obOpenFire
About the article about ESR.. oh, never mind. :-/

obOpenSores
jacobo, should I tell you about my misadventures with an automobile battery? Like the one that permanently edited my eyebrows, and involved an oxyacetylene torch? Or would you rather not know? :-)

obApache
We've selected the management company for our ApacheCon events and are working on a contract now. Stay tuned to the announcement list if you care..

health
Don't worry, I won't say anything about it. :-)

definitely post-meridian, EDT

obSource
At the urging of someone over on the Jikes (not here on Advogato, I don't think) I finally got around to creating a SourceForge project for the CVSROOT enhancements I've been making. The project is called Spackle, for 'CVS ACLs' -- sideways. Sort of. SourceForge rejected the initial project request within hours, but it took several days for them to get around to telling me why. In fact, they never did -- they just reviewed the additional info I put in my 'why?' request and determined they had enough to approve the project -- which they did.

State of the Union
I'm keeping my thoughts about the U.S. President's address to myself -- except to not that he didn't inventalise any words during it.

post meridian, EDT

yack! and Phoon
How about yak? Multi-leveled, as in your original 'hurl', and also a take-off on 'gnu'. (Note: I do not think the meanings are related at all!)

Uh, duh..
I was going to mention something hackish, but I forget what it was. D'oh!

To _(), perchance to gettext()..
Some of the language purists over in PHP-land have just discovered to their horror that _() is in PHP (and has been since 3.0.7) as an alias for gettext(). And whether it makes the language leper-outcast-unclean is in debate. I threw in my 0.02 Euro (hey, the chocolate coins last Winter were Euros!) but I do not think it will make any difference. I have little to no patience with elegance in place of useability.. particularly when sacrificing the latter for the former, even eventually, will break existing users and applications.. So I am not popular; what else is gnu? :-)

Virtual monkeyshines
When my new laptop arrives I am going to try running Linux as the base system with VMware to get W2K as well. If that will not work, I will reverse the order -- but I would prefer the first option. I would almost rather have a separate Windows laptop (as I do now) than to subjugate Linux under Windows..

post meridian, EDT

Happiness is geek toys
Only about one week left before my new laptop is supposed to arrive: a ThinkPad T21, 20GB, DVD. I took advantage of a special 'double the base memory for free' offer; the base memory was 128MB, and I ordered an additional 256MB, so now the total is 512MB. Unfortunately, there are only two memory slots, and apparently I am going to receive one 256MB DIMM and two 128MB DIMMs. Anyone want to trade a 256MB for two 128MBs? :-)

writing
Making excellent progress on my Apache Module Development in C book. Funny thing; it was going very slowly when I was working on it with rbb, but when he got fed up with the slow pace and dropped out, I got motivated. I guess I am just not a good collaborator when it comes to writing..

Progress is also being made on my Apache Cookbook (for O'Reilly), but it is slow. Every time I think I have a handle on everything I want to include on a particular topic, two or three more crop up. I need to put a stake in the ground, before Nat (my editor) puts one in my heart..

7 Sep 2001 (updated 7 Sep 2001 at 16:37 UTC) »

ante meridian, EDT (edited post meridian, EDT)

Some people...
Just a verbum sapienti: I personally highly recommend against ever trying to have any sort of relationship with Remote Communications, Inc. other than as a user of their products (such as mod_gzip). I am speaking personally, and not wearing any hat except that and my Apache (and open-source) developer beanie.

I have moved the full rant off Advogato to my own site.

Why do I bother posting this? Primarily because I want to set the record straight before someone tries to cockeye it. Secondarily, so that other developers may not have to undergo the same crap I did in coming to these conclusions.

40 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!