Older blog entries for Wheat (starting at number 93)

Well, I'm out here on Pender Island house sitting and looking after my parents dog. What a sweet house it is! Today is day three of a ten day span. It was blow your mind sunny today. I took lots of pictures and went swimming in Roe Lake - it was pretty cold so I just swam out about 20 feet and then scurried back to shore. I brought my Linux box so I could do some hacking too, but the weather hasn't been inducive to staying indoors. It's got to rain sooner or later though.

The tide was out really low today. The bay turned into a big mud flat. The tide has come in now, and the beach has all but disappeared. Sitting around watching the tide come in and out - my vacation from slacking.

I signed up with the local ISP today. There's only dial-up access offered, but it's not too bad, I can pull 5.5 K/sec on the 56K modem in the iMac. One nice thing about dial-up is you can set-up an account really fast - just make a phone call and wait 10 minutes. Compare this to the 6 week waiting lists for DSL access.

Tonight, reading Hall's account of his trip ot japan. Using Amazon's honour system payment system I chipped in a modest $8 for the trip - good to pay for good content when so often I pirate bad content. I enjoyed the account of the capsule hotel and the description of Akihabara: "It was like the California tech superstore Fry's but it was denser. It was Fry's on meth."

During the day, Craig, Dario and I hiked around Buntzen Lake. It was a good 3 hour hike. The east side of the lake was too popular for my liking, people every 500 ft. We only saw 3 groups of people on the other side, as we hiked up a trail that climbed the western ridge called Lakeview Ridge - which was a complete misnomer as there was only one view of the lake on the entire section of that trail and it was a very poor view at that.

We are making plans for many more weekend hikes this summer. You can get up to some small lakes behind Buntzen on the Lindsay Lake Loop trail which sounds interesting. And we're going to also hike the Chief, High Falls Creek Trail and my goal is to make it up the Lions this year.

Rogers Cable was bought by Shaw Cable. Then my modem started acting really poor, until Matt mentioned that Owain had the same problem and switching to DHCP fixed it. No more static IP for me, though that's not that big of a deal, and the modems fast again. It's going to be dial-up for the next week and a half as I spend it house sitting on Pender Island.

I like opera. Tech Preview 2 for the Mac (that's the old OS, not X) is out, and they have this excuse for releasing their software: "To fix the bugs most reported in TP1 and because TP1 expired." because TP1 expired.

I smell like chlorine, from the pool at the Y. I am working or at least intending to work again. Earn money, work on projects, create stuff and transact with other people.

Javien promises a release in March. Erm, it's April know. I know this because my landlady was calling me asking me where my frickin' rent cheque was. Anyways, their job descriptions read well, a revolutionary internet start-up, yeah! Except there's that dot-com downturn thing. "Doesn't matter, we'll start-up anyways!" Fast paced. Energetic. Creative energy. Been reading to many job description postings lately. My favorites are the "must be experienced with new and cutting edge technologies".

Bad Mouse

The ps2 mouse i stole from Stormix just up and died on me today. One minute it was fine, the next minute nothing. Not convinced that mice can just die, i figure something is wrong with my OS. I'm running unstable and my packages are kind of messed up. So i spend along messing about cluelessly and then accidentaly do a rm * (i meant rm *~) in /etc/init.d/. Oops, that took an hour to fix. I tried doing some apt-get install --reinstall package but many of the pre-removal scripts would die when they couldn't find the right file in /etc/init.d/. Oh well, at least I have a better understanding of function and structure of /etc/init.d/ :).

So i finally figure maybe my mouse died, but i'm not sure, so i go to London Drugs and get the cheapest wheely mouse they got there - this iMac coloured thing from Certified Data for $25. Wow, i have never encountered such a cheap mouse in my life. The rollers are so flimsy that it's almost impossible to get smooth motion from the mouse -- the cursor just bounces across the screen. First thing tomorrow morning i'm taking it back to the store and getting a real mouse. Logitech. Now there's a mouse manufacturer. My Logitech wheely mouse cost $30, and it's a fine quality mouse.

Projects

SQL Poll is now at release 0.4.0. It's got skins and supports 3 databases. Still got some bugs, but it's getting a little better.

Zoperl is a little more difficult than I thought. I'd intended to just take the PythonScripts interface and slap it on top of PerlScripts (er, that's ScriptPerl), but it's a little more complicated than that. March has been a very unproductive month for me too (only 2 advogato entries so far), and the coding has been coming along slowly. Perhaps April will be better. It better be. Biatch!

It took me days and days and days and I won't bother writting down all the great minutae (like the IDE/kernel problems and the broken floppy drive and the bad NIC and the syntax error in the firewall script and so much more) that I went through, but I've finally built my new linux bawx:

Chip: AMD 850 Mhz Thunderbird
Mobo: Asus A7V133
RAM: 256 MB PC-133
Screen: Hack brand 17" (it was cheap)
Mouse: AOpen 2 button + wheel (thanks st*rm*x)
Keyboard: Happy Hacking from PFU. Yeah, the keyboard is the bomb!

Matt ssh'd into my box after he helped my sort out some of the linux hardware compatability issues, it was 4 am and I was still futzing away at the system, and he was just waking up. He was "readjusting" his hours so he could start a new job on monday. He put some firewall stuff on the machine and turned off some services. Networking was a pain, but I'm a little more familiar with the details of it on Linux now: ifconfig, ifup, ifdown and modprobe 8139too :).

Tonight I tweaked my GNOME/sawfish desktop, and installed a buncha stuff: Zope, postgreSQL, XChat, Opera. Wow, Opera is so fast, i love it! I used sawfish's resize-window-interactively binding to make the Opera window full screen, and moved the banner ad so it's no longer visible on the screen. The link colors needed changing - Opera sets visited links to red for some reason. Bah! Unvisited is red. Visited is blue. And link underlining sucks.

I released a Zope product: SQL Poll.

I've got a couple preferences working on bud.ca, you can turn on the four side boxes on and off.

It's tedious doing Zope developement over a cable modem with a 5 year old Mac (lots of upgraded stuff but still), so I've been working this week on scrounging up a system. I also greatly miss using the Linux computer operating system (I used to have that on my Mac but dual booting is no fun). I was going to buy some old hardware from John. An AMD-K6-2 at 450 MHz with mainboard and 128 MB PC-100 RAM, and a tofu-coloured tower. But we spent all today working on the frickin' thing and it jes' kept crashing - something wrong with the hardware we reckon. I'm greatly considering buying a new board and CPU - you can get a lot for $350 or so.

For video, I yanked my second video card from the Mac, a Voodoo3 2000 - it took me forever to find PC-SAVE.ROM so I could flash back to a PC BIOS. I'd trashed my original PC BIOS file shortly after I got the card for some reason. I think I'd like to try Tribsoft's Jagged Alliance 2 port for Linux. There's a few games available for Linux that aren't on Mac. John suggested a dual boot with Windows for gaming, but two OSes is plenty for me, and I really don't think I'd derive pleasure from running Windows, even if just for gaming.

In the process of removing my V3, I somehow broke my Mac's G3 upgrade card. I was just trying to remove some of the dust around it, but now it don't work at all. It's a PowerForce and it looks like they have a 3 year warranty and a good return policy. One more try of fiddling with dip switches and CUDA buttons and I'm going to RMA the thing.

When I get the Mac fixed, and the new Zope-dev box built, I'll have two decent system. After I return to the workforce, perhaps I'll also pick up a laptop, then I'll have a great base of systems for UT lanpartys. Whee!

Hmm, so, hmm. I've been unemployed. I've been hanging out, mostly at home, "surfing the web". Doing a little work, a little hacking, watching the days go by. Listening to lots of electronica streams: trance, goa, jungle, and house.

Zope 2.3a2 seems to have broken my ZMailIn. Must fix.

Skipped out on my contract work to go hiking in North Vancouver today. It feels good on the legs and the lungs. We (CP, LF and SB) had fish and chips in Horshoe Bay. Then we returned to Stormix for an all-hands meeting. Which was weirdish because I don't work there anymore, but there has been lots of activity there as of late.

Tried to install Zope- Perl on the bag last night, but had trouble with MULTI_PERL. I think that the Debian Perl doesn't have the proper thread support option, but I'm not really sure yet - need to read the docs n' such a little better.

thump, thub, thub, thump.

Listening to streaming squidradio drum n' bass for hours on end, while playing with the server and sending emails and fixing web pages. hypnotic.

click, click, clack, clack.

put a pretty face on the Poll Product on bud.

I've got my email client to make this gentle "bah-bing" sound when there is new email. And since it checks for email every 15 minutes and I'm on a few high traffic mailing lists, it "bah-bings" all night and then gently wakes me up in the mornings.

Hiding out in my log cabin.

Watched A&E's remake of The Great Gatsby . Martin Donavan played a really good Tom. The music was terrible.

Tomorrow I go to stormix and clean out the rest of my desk and pick up my record of employment. Perhaps my last trip to the ol' office.