Older blog entries for abg (starting at number 56)

Finally updated some of my (very old) Python modules for to use distutils. Took me long enough...

Using a combination of Christmas and birthday money, I bought myself a Lesche and a GPS for this summers metal detecting expeditions. They didn't tell me that they came with a bad case of Sudden Cabin Fever.

I tossed a few improvements into EZGallery - you can see an online demo right here. It's not perfect yet, but I can crank out baby picture galleries like never before... 8^)

SPAMMERS MUST DIE

Gurno.com has been joe-jobbed and rendered pretty much unusable for the last three weeks or so. Chaos has ensued. There is a burning nugget of hatred inside of me for spammers. I'm about to start banging the 'email is broken' drum.

OSS

I've got a few things queued up to update once gurno.com returns to functional.

CVS

Let's just say that lots of people don't realize the power of simple tools and Free licenses.
19 Dec 2003 (updated 19 Dec 2003 at 17:17 UTC) »
Microsoft Wants You!

I received a message from Mike Surkan from Microsoft yesterday wondering if he could send a post to the NORLUG list and ask people about why they like Linux, what they'd like to see in Windows, yadda yadda.

I turned him down. Here's the page that I created about it, including my reasoning for turning him down.

Update: He sent the exact same message to the TCLUG list.

It's dead, Jim

My Linux box (K6-2 400) died two weeks ago. This gave me a great excuse to build my silent VIA EPIA Eden box. It's great and much faster than I expected.

EZGallery

Found a bug in the thumbnail routine. Haven't fixed it yet. 8^P

Elvis has left the building

My new project has me working on some Windows boxes, so I stopped off to pick up Elvis for the Windows world. Hey - new version! Hey - the website is busted! Hey - the new version segfaults (or whatever the Windows word is) upon startup! Hey - doh!

Ack Thpth. GVIM for Windows tries to be too helpful and I have a hard time getting all the bells and whistles turned off. WinVI is too 'windowsy', which is probably a good thing for most people, but the 'popups-instead-of-messages' drives me bonkers.

Elvis is just right. Unfortunately, I'll have to go WinVI or something for a while...

Just sent the letter to the Elvis maintainer - we'll see...

Thanks, bcully. I had forgotten about libslack.

I modified choad to use oggenc instead of lame. The Right Thing To Do is rewrite it all to be more general ond offer OGG as an choice rather than hardcoded in as lame is/was. I guess I should just drop the author a line and see if he'd accept a patch like that. If not, I'll just called it chood (o for ogg) and make it a minor fork.

And to anyone working on IRATE, thanks. A beer on me if we meet in person.

Posted by Post2advo

A little software stuff and the some spleen venting

I conducted something of an off-the-cuff experiment today. I deliberately posted what I hoped would be a half-way enticing link back to my home page in the early stages of a Slashdot story and then turned on the log watching to see the small slashdot effect roll in.

It was satifying, watching the pitter patter, like during those springs when the snow is melting and you toss some chunks of ice in the run off streams and see the water divert around it. (The page was my Tivo story, fwiw.)

Is there some sort of "Keep Alive/Resurrect" daemon/program out there? Last year I wrote a renice daemon for my Zaurus - now I was thinking of modifying it to monitor a process and restart it if it ever quits. A perpetual Mozilla kiosk would be one use. Forget about futzing with settings, if someone closes it, it would automagically restart without user intervention. It would take a few hours of work to modify my rend to act this way...

My turn to whine

I got home tonight to some bad news from my wife - my mother was cancelling her trip here to visit us, including my daughter. I had been looking forward to this for weeks. I had been pumping Linnea with "Grandma Bonnie is coming!" this whole week and she cancels two days before she was supposed to come down. We had things planned! This was supposed to be a big, memorable weekend! My damn sister, my check-forging, money-stealing, emotionally-unstable sister has fscking wrecked it again. And what can I do about it? Nothing. I cannot complain - my mother is suffering from her daughter's misdeeds, agonizing over whether my sister will do jail time and what will happen to her. So when she calls and begs to come home for the weekend, my mother relents and cancels me.

Me. Me who always gets cancelled.

Me. Who hasn't asked for a g*ddam thing but time for years.

Me. Who never gets it.

There, my whining for today, on you rather than her.

12 Oct 2003 (updated 12 Oct 2003 at 18:34 UTC) »

It ain't perfect yet. ;^)

So I post using the script, without ever looking at Advogato and see people already discussion reStructuredText. Crazy. Well, not that crazy since this is where I first heard of ReST. Thanks to that forgotten poster for pointing it out to me - I love it.

A

12 Oct 2003 (updated 12 Oct 2003 at 03:08 UTC) »

Sometimes you find something that really excites you, something that you can feel will make things better, faster, easier for you. Here is where I keep singing the praises of reStructuredText.

The format is so natural for me - almost exactly how I have been writing text files since day one. I haven't learned it all yet, but picking it up has been painless so far - reminds me of running into Python way back when. It just felt right.

Anyways, that's all for now. I've got some stuff to install, a box to fix, hardware to unpack, a shelf to build... God, what I am doing here?

Fsshhhwp.

10 Oct 2003 (updated 10 Oct 2003 at 21:24 UTC) »

Last effort, I promise. Advo is not for debugging. Advo is not for debugging...

I've become quite adept at shell scripting in the last year or so. They've moved away from the handcuffed style that batch files had beaten me into and into full-fledged programs. Whereas I used to reach for Python to do the simple things, now I can drop-kick a shell script to do the same thing without comprimise.

Anyways, the post2advo script will go up at gurno.com later today, if I get a chance. It's a combo shell and python script - shell to tie the programs together and python to do some of the file input/output.

See ya on the blip side

Note: almost. ;^)

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