Recent blog entries for aaronmalone

[10:38:05] * aaron meditates on the spelling disparity between fcntl() and ioctl().

Convinced the company to pay for a cell-phone for me. yay.

lilo, it's good to see you back.

Went to a Windows 2000 Early Adopter seminar yesterday. I'm not likely to ever touch the thing, but the Boss wanted my perspective. I thought "for maximum irony value, I'll take my ancient 486-33/8MB laptop running Debian."

But I was wrong.

Maximum irony value was me winning the business-card drawing for a free 5-day Windows 2000 training and certification course.

Well, whatever. I'll pass it off to the NT admin. In the meantime, I have better things to do. While I was there I started sketching out some design for a pygtk-based DNS file editor. That'll be fun. But before that, we're moving our offices. If you'll excuse me, I have to find a box for my books.

Wait a minute. I used to be an Apprentice... now I'm an Observer, even though my certifications haven't changed. Did I miss something?

Here's a thought -- why do people spend $12 on a new trade-paperback copy of a book, when they could go down to a used bookstore and get a copy for $2?

dammit. The Junkbuster proxy blocks cookies, which breaks Advogato's login tracking. I hate changing my netscape prefs all the time.

Playing with webmail solutions -- I like IMP, but it doesn't seem to particularly like POP3 boxes. the Boss wants address books, though. Too busy doing 'actual work' this week to get any personal coding done so far. blah.

On the upside, though, Virtual Gameboy works great in X, so I can play Pokemon. ;)

crackmonkey wants to reimplement Citadel in Python? I like it. I miss the Good Old Days (tm) of single-line BBSes.

kelly: you're right about the color thing -- perhaps a small [OAJM] marker by the name would be in order?

*yawn* Back at work after a great weekend with friends. Watched a pile of kung-fu DVDs, then saw Romeo Must Die in the theater. Go see it. Yes. Do.

Did a bit of rock-climbing on Saturday. That combined with the six-hour drive home has my legs hating me. Sleeping on the couch wasn't good for my back either.

Anyway. Good stuff -- finally got a copy of New Riders' Python Essential Reference, and the Cure's new album as well. Bad stuff -- while I was gone, and the NT admin and the Boss were in St. Louis for a 3Com thing, our Alteon Layer-4 switch gave out and started dropping HTTP connections randomly. Such a PITA trying to troubleshoot hardware issues over cellphone and pager. But once we fixed it and sent out an explanatory email, we got a flood of replies from users telling us how great our service is and how much they appreciate our honesty and candor when we have a problem. Wonders never cease.

Back to writing billing software <-> server interfaces today. Perhaps I'll upgrade to RedHat 6.2 at some point.

Taking some time out of billing/radius/database projects and getting back to learning to code useful C.

Played around with libcdaudio. Python doesn't seem to have a useful interface for CD control on non-IRIX systems (outside of doing ioctl calls, at which point you may as well use C), so I may write a libcdaudio module at some point. whee.

Incidentally, if you're working on a scientifically-oriented project and you haven't already talked to peat, do so. He's heading SEUL's Science section and would want to hear from you.

FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE is out!

Wrote a fake POP3 server the other day, as part of a project here at my ISP. The idea is that if you haven't paid your bill, the radius server notices this and gives you a special IP address. Then our Layer-4 switch routes all your POP traffic to my fake server, where there is only one message, saying 'pay your bill!'. Similar with port 80 (http), and the rest goes nowhere.

It works fine for me through telnet, netscape, fetchmail, etc., but Outlook Express and Outlook both hang after RETR 1. Driving me nuts.