Older blog entries for amars (starting at number 292)

I'm back from Mexico. Great trip. Pictures soon. Back to work. Forgot how to type. Crap.

Some interesting quotes from a book I started reading that I think at least one person that frequents this site (who will remain nameless) should take note of.

"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

and finally...

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind of his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbors shoulder or fly at his throat."

-- Eric Hoffer

Some food for thought anyways, given the current international political climate.

I think i'm glad I waited to buy a powerbook or ibook. I'm definitely getting one of those new 12" powerbooks as it solves every problem I had with the iBook i.e. dual display (not mirroring) and higher resolution. I'd have somethign small enough to carry around with me but powerful enough to use as a desktop. If i get any of the contracts I recently submitted bids for, i'll have enough cash flow to pay for one. If i don't have one in the next 6 months I will have failed myself.

What in the hell kind of Piece of Shit (TM) e-commerce package produces invoices without the date of the transaction. It's a 10 line HTML edit in invoice.php. Screw contributing. It's so trivial it's worth letting them A) do it on their own B) leave it out. Have I mentioned that I hate OSCommerce?

I fucked up. A piece of software I wrote (and sold, ack) apparently, as I've just painfully realized, isn't compatible with any dates after Dec. 31 2002. I'm convinced it's a quick fix in one file. I will fix it tomorrow. I got back (well, back to Guanajuato) from Real De Catorce in San Luis Potosi, Mexico today and am swamped with other work, from both employers. Crap.

More progress. I have a working search engine. It's not pretty.

Note to self (and others): Through-the-web content management is a BAD IDEA (tm).

Ok, so i was wrong, --load-cookies for wget does work, but only when not involving any of the servers form work. That annoys me. At first, i suspected that maybe it has problems using cookies retreiving information from itself, so i tried it from another server and the same problem persists, so maybe it's a problem involving retreiving files from behind a firewall? same subnet? I was however, for testing purposes able to curl another site and use the cookie file it prodiced to retreive a logged in file with wget. Argh.

I'm about ready to start back at square one and do this the ugliest, most insane and annoying way of establishing a search functionality. Sadly, my soloution wouldn't be too far out of place, considering the client.

I'm hungry.

Finally making progress. I've been given the task of writing a search engine for one of our clients' site, which uses a (to remain nameless for now) project i've always hated. Initially, i wrote a curl script to log in and fetch the cookie info to be passed on to wget with th -r function to recursively index the site. That didn't work... the curl script did, but the wget didn't. For some reason, i could not get wget to post the cookie information. I tried like hell too, using the --header functions to manually set the cookie and by using the --load-cookies option and neither produced any results.

After failed attempts doing it the sexy, seemingly proper way, i decided to go with the current tradition of modifying an existing search engine to support indexing cookie information. Sounds easy enough, i just need to find the HTTP code and add an extra header. Unfortunately, i couldn't get phpDig installed and working properly, and I don't understand ht://dig. I even looked at phpMySearch, but as is the case with most other phpMy* projects out there it's a flaming piece of shit. phpMyAdmin is gratis, but it is by no means libre, they require that all changes to the code, even private, be mailed to them, and they reserve the right to forbid you/anyone from using their code.

So, now i'm writing it from scratch. I'm ending up writing everything in PHP, which may not be best for the spider/index, but oh well. I've gotten it to fetch a file at my discretion, strip all of the links and do so as a logged in user, so it indexes information for a logged-in user.

I was sick all day yesterday. Very sick, and i can't figure out why. At best, it's something I ate, but i'm still unsure. It's the first time i've been sick in Mexico, which is odd considering how much street food i eat here.

In Mexico, doing the whole 'vacationing while working from internet cafes' bit. I'm enjoying my time here, but it's pretty damn frustrating while working. I truly have descended into the depths of the dopey linux/mac user frustrated by the, well, frustrations of windows world. I've gone from a working environment tuned by me for me, to using a shared internet connection in a room somewhere in Mexico, using an unfamilar computer running some version of windows on a keyboard that has just enough of a mapping difference to drive someone like me who uses vim crazy. I found a mac, but they are using OS X 10.0, which is tolerable, but their keyboard doesn't work for me, i wonder if i had brought my keyboard, i could daisy-chain the two and use my own, but i doubt that would matter because i couldn't get the machine to SSH into the ocmputers at work, os it was a moot point. The cafe that used Linux the last time i was here closed down, good riddance, they kicked me out every time i opened up a terminal.

Also frustrating, is having to move from one place to another because the person in charge reboots the computer that is sharing the connection, while in the middle of a putty/ssh session and can't get back on.

Oh well, merry christmas everyone.

I never thought i'd be so happy with a D, but i'm glad to finally be done with my calculus requirements. My GPA sucks, but the way i look at it, it can only get better. I've finally finished all of the bullshit classes one has to take in college and can now focus on whats really important, and for the most part what itnerests me the most.

Today, after a month of inactivity, i was able to make some more progress on my Objective-C time log. re-arranged the program layout and added support for command line arguments. So far `./clock foo create` will create a new project called foo with a .plist xml file in ~/Library/Application Support/timelog/foo.plist. That was the hardest part, to be honest. Adding the rest of the commands will be easy but so far, it's planned ot work like this...

clock <project> <action>

if there is no action present, and <project> exists, it will read in info about that project, change my status (in/out) and record it back to the .plist, so i have a record of time worked on a specific project. <action> can be one of create,delete,status and probably more soon enough. `create` creates a new project `delete` deletes a project and `status` displays the current status, plust a brief summary of information relating to that project.

A cool feature i'd like to implement in the future is some kind of integration with iCal, where I can produce a history of time worked represented in iCal in all it's glory.

So far it is command-line based, in the future i'll probably end up writing a cocoa gui to it, or at least use the TLSession ObjC class for a gui version. But i'm still working on mastering Foundation.h, which will be awhile. At least for now, one can interact with the resultant .plist with Apple's plist browser/editor.

I really enjoy using vim (no, really i do) but dammit, why can't it be consistent? At work, we have been moving everything over to some new servers and now, and apparently the version of vim on the new servers aren't so friendly to my mac keyboard.

It's almost understandable, because i have the shorter keyboard that came with the B&W G3s. The delete key is where most backspaces are, and works like a backspace. The new vim treats the delete key (functionaly a backspace key) as a delete key, it even maps it as <del>, so it's backwards and drivign me crazye. Yes, i've tried fixdel with no success. Also, when in command mode, the up and down arrow keys aren't recognized, so i can't scroll through history, which is doubly annoying.

As far as I can tell, it's not a setting in vim because it works when i log in from my linux pc with a normal keyboard, and I can't find any settings on either server, even though it works on one but not the other. Also, on the old setup, it would remember the cursor position when i close and re-open a file, i can't figure out how to restore that functionality.

So far, my vi pocket ref hasn't been helpful... not for the said problems at least.