Older blog entries for cTaylor (starting at number 121)

26 Aug 2004 (updated 26 Aug 2004 at 15:34 UTC) »
Hooah!

Let me start by saying I'm a big fan of source based distros for a large number of reasons. The primary reason for this bias deals with the fact that getting any kind of new software installed on a binary distro can be a real bitch. Source or binary package - it doesn't matter, this problem is something unholy and can poison your soul.

I finally got Redhat9 working with linux-2.6.8-1. This effort took a week for a variety of reasons (mostly management related stuff) but, it works. So, I'm happy. We have a software requirement to use Redhat9 and since our hardware is new...things like old network drivers and power management code just didn't work well. Hence the desire to trouble about this new kernel on an unsupported distro.

I'd also like to note that many of my friends would agree. I am a sick person. I like to do things like this just "because". I also have a remarkable ability to crash any software system on the planet within 3 minutes of sitting down to it. I'm reknown in some circles.

Since I had such a tough time getting this bizarre configuration working here's how I troubleshot the hell out of the problem (this effort required ninjary built up from years of binary-package and source based distro experience):
  • Fresh Redhat9 install.
  • RPM install of the 2.6.8-1 kernel
  • Source installation of modules-init (making sure to `./configure --prefix=/` and `make moveold` prior to `make install`, running `./generate-modprobe /etc/modprobe.conf` at the conclusion of the build installation.
  • Source installation of the 2.6.8-1 kernel.
  • mkinitrd vmlinuz-2.6.8.1.img 2.6.8-1 && cp vmlinuz*.img /boot
  • Update grub
  • Reboot, make the sign-of-the-cross, and cross fingers.
Now for a review of what happened. B/c I've been a Gentoo user for the past 2 years, my brain has been subject to some un-binary-package-friendly ways of thinking.

The first step is obvious. For some reason the only way to get binary-package systems "cleanly" installed/updated usually requires a fresh reload. The db backend is unholy and hates it when you make major dependency alterations.

Second step, this got all the init.d and rc.d scripts patched for the 2.6 kernel on the Redhat9 machine I was working on. It also provided me a good testing ground for my next step.

Third step, do this with source. It's sexier. And when you reboot if you see "Q_MODULE" type stuff floating around. That means your modprobe, etc programs are in a bad path. And the kernel can't get modules loaded and stuff.

Fourth step, seems redundant, no? Well, let's just say I needed special tweeks for my platform. That and on my hardware, the rpm version of the kernel's acpi support (I suspect) kept shutting the machine off for a reason I've yet to determine (well, that's what the Magic 8 Ball told me).

Next step, this was brutally important. I've never-ever-ever had to use mkinitrd. Apparently, est muy importante for Redhat9 initalization scripts and grub. (I use lilo at home). Do this. For the love of God and all things holy on this earth...do it.

The last two steps are trivial and require no explaination.

End rant. Back to Scout. It's *kinda* working. MFC ListView objects hate me.
Scout

Today I get back on the Scout for Win32 train. Ouch, my shoulder hurts.
24 Aug 2004 (updated 24 Aug 2004 at 19:23 UTC) »
More Fun

Woke up this morning and discovered that someone had broken into my car again (second time in 2 weeks and on the same night as the first break-in) - except this time they managed to leave fecal matter in the back seat. What amazes me is that they took absolutely nothing from my vehicle. Not-a-thing.

Strange but true. I've notified the police and the property management firm. I'm tempted to buy a Louiseville Slugger and some zip ties - maybe pull an all nighter next monday evening watching over my car. Possibly nab the perp in the act next week. Another point of fact that really stranges me out. There are electro/magnetic locks leading into the parking lot and it's about 3 stories from the earth. This leads me to believe it's possibly someone from the local university that's started picking on older cars in the lot (I drive a very ancient lumina).

In other news, still waiting on my power supplies. I'm getting really antsy b/c they are due in another day or two.
Last night...

Went to see Gomez at the Roxy! It was probably the best show I've seen in months! The show started off with a couple of slow, mellow, tunes and then immediately picked up into a really energetic set. Much thanks to Adam and Cate for a) telling me about it and b) linking up with me to go see it.

Yester-day

I was reading "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" at a local Starbucks and my eye was caught by the NY Times. They had an article about Team America and I found an interesting typo of sorts, and thus I quote:

"It turns out that making a puppet walk across a room, much less making it take a flying leap into a fountain while machine-gunning a terrorist, requires painstaking time and effort -- enough to make the filmmakers yearn for their hand-drawn, one-dimensional roots."

The Boys From 'South Park' Go to War, by S. Waxman, August 22, 2004, New York Times

Okay that's a direct quote...and I hope that info underneath it covers any copyright/referencing issues...see the bold portion for the wackiness.

This week

This week I should be getting power supplies for my laptop and the desktop. Hooray! Now I get to find out just how screwed up my new/old hardware actually is! Nuff said.
20 Aug 2004 (updated 20 Aug 2004 at 11:15 UTC) »
Humour Factor

Found this just a minute ago. It made me laugh. While I wouldn't have stated it *just* like that, I would have to agree with the underlying theme of the slogan.

Now that I've *again* managed to alienate my readership, or lack there-of, I'd have to say that spice and peppermint tea is really good stuff.

Flashback

Last night I had one of those flashbacks to my so-called college life. I walked around aimlessly for a couple hours downtown thinking about how I was going to write a semi-context free grammar for english when I happened upon a new restaurant no less than 3 blocks from where my apartment is...

I did the only sensible thing I could do, I walked in checked out the menu and ordered a piping hot dish of chicken tenders and fries. As some of you know, this was a Thursday night ritual.

This ritual was usually executed after completion of another successful Army ROTC lab and I would usually sit down, eatup drink about 6 cups of coffee and then continue to read more about whatever academic project's deadline was swiftly becoming a reality.

Usually those kinds of "study" nights would be interrupted by about 4-5 friends that I just *had* to chat with and would end with me running to the library to escape conversation or going home and just passing out from exhaustion (a 2-3 hour sleep cycle for a semester will do that and other fun things to you).

Which brings me back to...

Long story short. I started work on a grammar now. The AC adaptor into my PC laptop died so, I can't really hack now until the new one makes it into my hands. My desktop's power supply died so I'm getting a new one in the mail. The ibook has been deadlined since May and I can't help it that whenever I try to send it back, I have, yet another, trip overseas to make.

Life is tough sometimes but, this situation is probably helping me more than it's hurting. I've been able to resolve some issues I had with the project since the get-go.

In Conclusion

Hopefully the new Exorcist movie won't suck ass. Oh, Surphaze...check this out...
17 Aug 2004 (updated 17 Aug 2004 at 13:11 UTC) »
Grammar checking...fun and uh...fun!

I got my database cleaned out. Apparently, my xml based dictionary has a dual use for hyphens. Obnoxious? Yes! So, now I have to validate all hyphenated words prior to "shelving" them into the db. Python is so cool (I feel like a total kiddie when I say that).

Now I'm working toward the meat and potatoes of the problem and I hope to have some of the basic data structures completed in the next couple of weeks. After a lot of reading I think Early is the way. The tough portion of this project is about to make it's way into the mix - that being the issue of grammar creation (terminal and nonterminal definition).

I'm pretty intimidated by this part of the application - I found queequeg the other day. It's a python based grammar checker that uses WordNet and it's based on the PennTree tag set (for parts of speech). I was planning on looking at the FSA model that was used in that application as a starting point. I'm also thinking I may need to ixnay on some of the tags found in my dictionary. Some of them can't even be defined through a google search!

From what I've read, unification is the emphasis of their approach. Maybe I'm over emphasizing the parsing porition but, for right now atleast, I'm more concerned with that, the over emphasis of any piece of the project. Unification will come in time.

In other news

I'll be offically be moving to Augusta for a couple months. The army has some mandatory training for me up there so, I'll be away from Atlanta for about 5 months time. I've got like 2-3 weeks to get all my stuff into storage. So I'm a bit pressed for time. My civilian employer is cool with it so, I'll have a job waiting for me once I wrap up this stint.

Then I get to pull another month of travel sometime close to my triumphant return to Atlanta. Hopefully, I can focus on getting back into shape and into a better routine while I'm out at this 'school'. Just as soon as I start getting back into the groove, my athletes foot "issue" goes into overkill and basically incapacitates my right foot. Let's just say...it hurts to walk. So running has been out of the picture for the past week or so.

Tinactin is really helping out. And now that I've offically grossed out whatever readership I do have. It's time for me to get back to work.
Movie-age

Aliens Versus Predator was total metal. I actually was surrounded by a nice crowd of people. It's been a couple of years since I've seen a movie and people were laughing out loud at appropriate moments.

Code

Many of my friends from university are really getting interested in my grammar checker. i've almost completed the darn thing. still waiting to get good data for the db. in fact...i'll probably just hack the db code out tonight while I watch the Judo portion of the olympics.

More Whining

Well I got my new desktop this week. Built it from parts BUT the power supply is gimped out. Seriously. All I have to do is tap it with a finger and my computer will turn on or off depending on it's current "power state".

Still struggling from a lack of social life in Atlanta. I've some things I'm going to try next week to improve that. I guess that's an issue when all of your coworkers are old men (40+), you travel every other month, and you are still a foreigner in a "big" city.

Enough...

okay now to find something to do with myself...

out...Chris Taylor
Funny Thought this was funny, for multiple reasons.

"It does seem like they matured a lot on these episodes because you don't always find them destroying Carl's stuff and they curse a lot more(especially Meatwad)."

Okay, if you don't see the irony in that statement...you need help.

Work

Haven't gotten around to working with the grammar checker recently or docing mono for that matter, spent the past week doing the army "thang". Got torn up by mosquitos, it was a lot of fun...I mean that.

I hear the new doom is "intense". This just means I need to get a new machine so I can see it for myself. Also need to see AvP. Like, tonight.
3 Aug 2004 (updated 3 Aug 2004 at 14:57 UTC) »
Kudos bellin!

Much thanks to bellin for mentoring my py-bsddb learning. Today I'm going to wrap up the extra POS (that's Parts-Of-Speech) extraction code and start work on the word to POS mapping code.

It's offical, I'm insane!

Maybe in a week, I'll have the bsddb wrapped up for the grammar checker and I can start writing the "Actual" grammar checking code!

I found a couple of good resources on grammar checking, I guess this is a good time to drop some references... I still have a ways to go with this project. A LONG way to go actually. But, the idea is to have a grammar checking engine that prints out nice explainations of errors on text-input streams. I'm also trying to make it `pluggable` to maybe extend support for other languages someday...english is going to be the default. I kind of envision this library working like this: user makes an engine initalization call (selecting language/grammar choice); user then takes a text stream and passes that to the engine; the engine cranks on that stream and returns a list of errors.

I'm probably going to go insane writing this project, but I think my resources are good and, of course, I'm prototyping all of this in python first, doing a C binding later. I want to ensure that my ideas about tackling this problem are close to being feasible.

I opted for a non-statistical solution b/c I don't have a beowulf cluster lying around to compute N-Gram/HMM values for words.

Yeah, I'm going to go completely insane.

I guess I'm just glad to finally be working on something that has entirely attracted my attention. I mean to say, that some of my other projects are still up for work (Lymric, Scout, etc) but, this problem is really academic and I can but only hope that I'll actually follow through, and complete, this effort.

Oh, and JEdit is the sweet nectar.
Back!!!

Well I made it back safely from my trip overseas. One of the most wonderful things to see when you get back are extremely low-cost utility bills. Then again...I'm single so, that's one of the big things for me...gee, I sound cold or lame.

A special thanks to all of my friends that emailed me while I was out. That's probably one of the best experiences a person can get. Written/typed letters, there's nothing like 'em.

While I was out, I managed to learn me some python. Which was nice and handy - that's going to be my prototype language of choice now (if I can't articulate myself with python, then I just need to rethink things completely).

The grammar checker is coming along really well. Right now, I've been able to gather parts-of-speech just the way I wanted them - now I just need to figure out a way to store them, bsddb is looking like the solution to my problem but, I've still some learning about that db to wrap up.

Scout is still in the shop.

I've been thinking a lot about how I'm living and I feel like I've really managed to limit myself for varying reasons, mostly related to the amount of travel I do in my job. I know this is a bunch of bunk but, I can't really seem to find something that I'm overly passionate about being apart of. Right now, I'm thinking about joining a judo club, maybe getting involve in FreeBytes (computer for low-income families), and some type of service for the homeless that's associated with my church. I have concerns about church oriented organizations (mostly, I don't want to be surrounded by yuppie-born-agains, trust me, many things lose validity with me once I see folk from that walk-of-life). So, I cross my fingers.

Now for the random and off-topic, It's strange but, everyone I meet asks about a "significant other" in my life and maybe it's just me, but, I kind of get the feeling that the entire department is really over emphasised in culture (not just mine). I'm not saying it's overrated. I'm just saying it seems like the focal point of so many people/things going on around me. I get this question a lot from random people and I'm getting to the point now where "what are you waiting for" responses to my "Don't have one" are getting old. I'm half tempted to just ignore the question entirely. It also feels equally inaccessible for me right now b/c, I almost feel like I'm walking around on training wheels and am just waiting for an accident to happen. Strange, yes, but true.

I have to say one of the things I did not miss while I was out, jumped immediately to mind while I was in target buying a food processor for my new falafel/humus-making-endeavour, I saw a least ten guys walking around wearing peach/pink/light-colored polo shirts with kakhi shorts, alongside rayban-esque sunglasses with beer-coozy-material'd sunglass straps, oh and don't forget the flip-flops with absolutely zero arch support.

I guess the reason why I find this so funny, is just something beyond uniformity of dress - I see this kind of thing as a reflection of the "fast-food" mindset in Western society (something I heard a lot of while I was out). This kind of thing just sounds to me like: don't give me any surpises, don't give me any real options or anything to really get excited over, I'll take #5 b/c it's #5(globalization folks!). There's a lot of +'s and -'s to that thought process but, I guess my thoughts about it all are obvious.

Go fig. Oh, I've reverted to the short-hair style.

Shout-outs. Surphaze, email me about all that crap I sent you while I was out. Bellin, yo, sorry man, had to trim the hair - I just don't do `shaggy` - btw, I've got a bunch of photos from the trip, I'm slowly going through them and getting some of the best.

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