Older blog entries for abg (starting at number 45)

Note: I cleaned this up by hand after the XML stuff blorped to the page. Oops.

Ran rend through valgrind and came out with a clean, non-leaky slate. I had suspected as much, seeing as how I had been running in on my Zaurus for about a week or so with no problems, but it's nice to have someone(thing) else tell you what you want to hear.

Typeset someone else's book in LaTeX to learn how it works. I've always believed in trial by fire and I think that it came out well. 140 or so pages and it's almost done. This has inspired me to start on the two books that I've wanted to do: both about X - one as user and one as programmer, both aimed at the complete novice. I've started the X programmer one and have about 1.5 chapters of 5 or so planned done.

Looked into adding PNG support to CTWM, but ran into a few problems. The newly added JPEG support is pretty clean for a while and then it enters code that might as well be marked /* Here be dragons */. I need to contact the guy and see if he'll update the code to include a few comments. With all the bit shifting taking place, I'm a little dubious about it's portability, but the list has been deathly quiet recently.

The LUG meeting tonight was cancelled, only to find out that someone new had shown up and tried to join. Murphy's Law strikes again: The first time we cancel a meeting in our 2.5 year history and we leave a New Member out in the cold. Doh!

Consumed a few cheapies tonight and tried to put a computer desk together. Complete failure. Damn. Will have to take many, many pieces apart and suffer the righteous indignation of a wife who thought that drinking and building don't mix.

They don't.

Anyways, - ordered the last little bit that I'm gonna need for my mini-itx box. Never thought that I would be considering round IDE cables (had considered them the worst sort of chrome) but need to save the space, as I'm building it inside a 6"x7"x7" box.

See ya

Feeling the love

I'd just like to take a moment to give a hearty "Thank You" to all you Free Software developers out there. The whole Free Software Movement has really changed me - the people I've met, the code, the ideas. Keep up the good work.

Stuff

Packaged up Glows on a lark after a guy at work liked it. (Screen shot) The strange thing is that the screen shots that I have imply that the balls are clipped a little, while the naked eye says otherwise. *shrug*

LUG Ideas

1. CodeFest - Drawing from the InstallFest idea, I think think that I'm going to try and organize my LUG into taking 6-8 hours some Saturday morning/afternoon and doing a "Code Fest". A pre-selected program (planned ahead of time with help from the developers of the same) will be worked upon by everyone in the LUG. Those that can code will work on coding certain assignments while those that cannot will work on improving/creating documentation. I think that it would be a nice boost for a project to get a lump chunk of work done by people and would serve as a learning experience for all of us. Must think more about this one.
2. Parades! - During the summertime there are literally dozens of local parades just begging for groups to join. I think that the LUG can march and give out either free CDs (tres expensive) or coupons for Knoppix CDs that can be redeemed later at ... (Public Library?)

stuff

I've always written debugging stuff into my C code in the following way:

dprintf (char *, ...) {
#ifdef DEBUG
[stuff]
#endif  /* DEBUG */
}

and I just assumed that the compiler would see that it's a NOP when not compiled with -DDEBUG and do the appropriate optimizations.
I got into a rather pointless argument the other day with someone over whether or not all calls to this would be removed or if the compiled program would still visit here and waste a few instructions coming here and going back. Now that he has me thinking about it, I should probably investigate...

Zaurus

Been compiling many things for the Z recently, mostly just bringing curses console apps over. My Zaurus pages... Many, many, many thanks to the handhelds.org guys for use of their Public Development Clusters.

Life

Need a haircut.

Holy crap - one long freakin' day.

Up at 6:45 with my little one and accomplished probably a dozen rl things today, from working on the lawn to about 6 loads of clothes. So tired.

And I finally managed to create an ipk for hnb for the Zaurus. It's located on Zaurus software download page. I had to make a few changes to the rc file to fit the small Zaurus screen and I had to change the hnb code itself so that it knew about the Z's penchant for putting data and config files in strange places. Have a look at a screenshot of it running...

I'll have to contact the author tomorrow and let him know what I did...

Peace and prosperity to us all.

Put a public release of rend - the RENice Daemon out there for a few hours before realizing that I forgot to include an RC file for people to work with. D'oh. Oh well.

Bought a Goldtouch keyboard off of Ebay that arrived DOA. Seller will stiff me, I guarantee it.

Sucky sucky suck suck suck

We set up a Clustering talk for the NORLUG meeting next month. Should be interesting. Put together a van of people for a computer show last weekend. Show was not so hot, but I bought a Make book for $5.

Found out that my ten year class reunion is being held on the Fourth of July. What a bunch of fscking idiots. Way to wreck something that I had been looking forward too. (Much harsher things that I said couldn't be typed.)

And yet, life is good.

Hey, can someone point me towards personal pages with clean, simple looking CSS? The time has come to move my domain forward, since I'm feeling a little stifled by it now. For examples of what my pages look like: 1 and 2. Anyone with any pointers, please let me know. It's all currently hand-coded HTML, fwiw...

Even though it's not there yet, I've bumped the IP Mnemonics page to 1.0. Unique machine names for all!

The NORLUG meeting tonight rocked. Best meeting yet. We talked wireless networks, community networking and the physics of it all. Tres kewl.

Got 256M RAM for the Sparc 5 in the mail. Put it in machine, booted it. Everything checked out. Got to play with SunOS 5.6 and, whew, a whiff of the Bad Old Days.

My *BSD experience allowed me to get the network configured quickly. Worked first time. To the net!...

Uh... Hmm... No, this machine wouldn't have SSH. [Pokes around CDE] "Web Browser"? [click] JavaOne. [cogs grind in brain, distant memories twinkle] My homepage looks good, sans .png. The alt tag fills in. Let's go to Advogato and post using JO! [Curses mouse. Worst. Mouse. Ever. These ones have never worked properly for me, clean mousepad or no...] Advogato. Logs in. Bzzt. Tried again. Bzzt. Must mean no cookie support. Try mozilla.org. Page render takes upwards of five minutes. Try dillo. Page loads well, download source, switch to term and... damn. .gz. [Gears creak] Sun.com had something about GPL software being offered through there. [Sun.com page takes even longer to render - look terrible.] Much link clicking later, still didn't find it. Gives up.

God almighty that was miserable. The FD comes in a few days. Goodbye Solaris, hello OpenBSD.

Analogy: It's the Cheese Shop sketch all over again...

[doorbell tinkle]
Palin: Ah, hello, welcome to the UNIX(TM) box!
Me: I was sitting in the basement, reading man pages when I had a peckish for a nice bit of bit bobbling.
P: Come again?
M: I'd like to do something useful.
P: Ah, well, you've come to the right place, sire. Finest UNIX of 1997!
M: I think I'll start with a little Python.
P: python: not found
M: Ah, well then perhaps a bit of Perl then...
P: perl: not found
M: Not my lucky day, is it? Perhaps some lynx then?
P: Not on Tuesday, no.
M: ssh?
P: No.
M: Tk?... Mwm?... Bash?...
P: No... No... No...
M: Ctwm?
P: Yes!
M: Oh, really? Excellent, I switch to Ctwm then.
P: Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking to me. That's my name - Mr. Ctwm.
[staring]
M: xv?... ssh?... Athena?... Any web browser?...
P: We do have JavaOne, sir.
M: Ah, you do?! Excellent. Bring forth the fromage de la McNeely.
P: It's a bit slow
M: That's okay, I'll take it anyways
P: It's probably slower than you like it
M: I don't care how fscking slow it is, fetch it with all due speed...
P: Ooooooh. The cat's eaten it.
M: Has he.
P: She, sir.
M: She.
[Pause]
M: You do have something useful, do you not?
P: Oh, Yes Sir! Stablest UNIX around!
M: Well, it's certainly free of apps to crash it.
[ad nauseum...]

bgeiger: Re: IPv6 - Urg. Uh... Umm... Hmm... 8^) Work in progress?

As for the drawl, we-e-e-ell y'all cain't be havin' that as an excuse, ya hear? 'Taint no way we can account for all that, mmm-hmm?