Older blog entries for abg (starting at number 25)

Um, cool?...

Found out today that Carleton College is using my gopher server in one of their protocol classes. Suck. Now I feel like an idiot for not updating it for so long. And there's big chunks of code that I'd simply like to disavow...

LUG Stuff

Mid-month 'beer' meeting last week. Small group, bad service at the bar. Not much to say. Mostly talked about how our jobs all 5uX3d. We've challened the Rochester, MN LUG to a distinctly un-geekish softball/bowling/whatever match. Should be fun.

Other stuff

Not much. I'm working on a Python/Tk program for letting me create product reviews quickly. (No comments about the amount of time that it takes me to write the program vs. review time saved.) Not ready for public consumption yet. I've also got a quick bit on why I had to get rid of my Tivo. (Note: Done. It's there now...)

You can always look at baby pictures...

robhudson : Being a quintessential 'lazy' programmer, I eschewed the work involved in make a WAP and simply used an OpenBSD 3.0 box, tossed the cards into ad-hoc mode and configured pf and NAT to restrict traffic to my IP only. (And turned off WEP, used SSH) I had that puppy working in under 15 minutes and haven't had a problem to this day. Zoom zoom zoom.

Also: Updated the GnuPG ROX Wrapper, but haven't uploaded it yet. Have an even newer version that does all the nifty RISC-OS-like stuph.

Also also: Am on the verge of coughing up $$$ for Battlesphere Gold for the Atari Jaguar

A: Not much happening. Wrote a GnuPG wrapper for the ROX desktop. Yippee.

B: Used Niftyness to score a free subscription to Jane magazine for the wife. Pee-yew - that's a rotten magazine. I didn't pay anything for it and I still feel as if I got ripped off.

C: Have a bunch of new ideas floating around in my head. May eventually convert some to bits. Formed a LUG bowling team. We start in a few weeks and we suck. 8^)

D: Has anyone gotten to Jeff Minter's pages recently? Have you read the Atari Times recently?

Not much happening. Kinda. Really too much happening to do anything else, if you knowhaddimean...

Had three wisdom teeth removed on Friday. The pain is not so bad, but the inconvenience factor is very high.

Working on a simple dock app to show a nice little moving starscape. If anyone could give me any pointers with the copyXPMarea routine, please drop me a line.

I bought a laptop (A Telxon 1194) and set up the OpenBSD box in the basement to act as a WAP (of sorts) to the laptop upstairs. It's dishing out as an X server (I (heart) SSH - forget WEP.) and finally, finally - I'm starting to see the age of my K6-233. Even though I bumped it up to 128M RAM, it's feeling a little pokey. She's still the most solid machine that I have - I love her dearly. But she's getting old...

Long time no diary: I had a baby (well, I didn't, you know what I mean...), started a LUG (well, I didn't - no, wait, I did...), cancelled my $60USD/month cable internet connection, picked up a $13USD month/30 hr./month dial-up for a few months, dropped the dial-up for the same cable connection this month at $26/mo, bought a camcorder, bought a laptop last weekend at a show and was pleasantly suprised to find out that it doubles as a pen computer, let the Gopher server development slow to a trickle (still want to finish it...), and wrote a bunch of crappy software that I haven't released yet.

There's other, more pointless stuff too (Won the Fantasy Football league here at work, for instance).

No time for more now. Will be soon. Promise.

abg@volkerding:/var/log$ grep -c default.ida access_log
899

w00t! Do I win something? :P

PyGS goes CVS in the next couple a days. My home gopher site, up and kicking for two weeks now. Still no IE support, I'm stumped but don't really care. 8^)

I had something really interesting to tell y'all but I forgot it. D'oh!

Mulix, your mail is bouncing.

I hate summertime.

Q*ick:

While everyone else was doing the honorable thing, I had my first day of work. Let's see how it went:

1. Arrive on time - check
2. Attend hours of orientation - check
3. Turn an AIX box worth more than my soul into an expensive paperweight by inadvertantly hosing /dev/null/ into a freakish file/device hybrid - check

I don't know what happened. We were cruising along at around 1715 when things ground to a halt. Quick inspection revealed that /dev/null/ was something with my name on it. Have no idea how that happened. Too late to call the admins - an entire night of work suspended because of my account. Bleah! Bad start!

AIX, I hate you.

H*cking:

Gopher server down all weekend due to kernel reboot - forgot to restart it and left for Central Minnesota. Doh! It's back up again. 0.4 rolls inexorably (-ibly?) closer.

G*pher: Version 0.3 has been up for a week without problems. IE doesn't seem to work and I'm having a hard time making myself care.

Di*t: Down 9.5 lbs so far! Hoorah for the hacker diet!

H*cking: Anyone from Northfield, MN know of or is interested in starting a LUG? Can't find any information on one and the Rochester LUG hasn't heard of one. With two colleges, I'm surprised one doesn't exists...

L*fe: Very, very good.

andrei: Don't focus too much on making every day 'unique' - for instance, if you're working on a big project, every day might seem quite like the others. Look for progress.

And if you really need some unique-ness, mentally draw a circle around your current home and head off in those directions heretofore unexplored. And really explore them - hit the alleys, look in the corners, talk to people. Give it an hour every night and I can guarantee that very few will be like each other.

ObGopher: Can someone with IE tell me whether or not you can see gopher://abg.sytes.net? I was at the library the other day and tried to test it with IE, but it wouldn't go. I dunno if it's my server or IE or what...

H*cking

My home gopher server is chugging along just wonderfully. I dished out a few hundred requests last night. Version 0.3 hits the streets today. I'm going to try and mirror the actual PyGS webpage/releases with the server, which means that I have to get the non-text file transfers going next.

Di*t

Hacker Diet - Day 7. I resisted the temptation to eat my shirt, but the mousepad wasn't so lucky. Mmmm... Low-cal mousepads... My last recruiting pitch picked up one person - if anyone else wants to join us, let me know. I'm in for the long haul, if you knowhaddimean.

L*fe

Did I mention that my wife is pregnant? First little hacker offspring due in January. These things come with Operating Manuals, right?