Older blog entries for chexum (starting at number 11)

work
I'm still not too well, but people won't leave me alone at home... at least let them pay me... That also mean even less fun today.

cactus: that's politics, and I don't like that, I'm not like my grandfather yet :)

books
welisc: opposite part of Europe yes, Hungary. In 1999 a 300 page fantasy paperpack would cost 3 euro, now a 200 page local sci-fi is about 3.6. Tolkien LotR illustrated hard-cover, ~1200 pages, about 24 euro (a bit cheaper than a current DVD); this C++ book should be about 40 euro (and paperback if I saw correctly). Books were expensive when they were half this yes. But anyway prices are hard to compare between countries, it does not sound cheap to me. Maybe it's still a nice country to live in :) Still might be a good investment for C++ addicts, indeed. But the language is prohibitive for people wanting a good buy, possibly. I rather buy 6-10 pulp sci-fi nowadays :)

life
Still almost boring. Remember the occasional cracker-hunt, coming back on backdoors, and you play wack-a-mole with him. Weird to do that with the former boss, who hired me almost exactly three years ago..

fun
Interesting times (as in the "Chinese" saying..). Linus just started to use BitKeeper, slashdot posted an article about arch.. Now I can see that the discussions on slashdot have very little value, even if you are bored all day... arch is a bit weird, it looks as a patchy maze of shell scripts (all different), but otherwise more likable...

welisc: funny, I've just seen that C++ book in my native language, and let me tell you, books are here getting *expensive*. The last time their price got so high was a few years ago, but this Christmas seems to have made all the publishers (not just of technical books) a lot greedier.

mirwin: Aha, another one got sucked into Wikipedia :)

DV: that's not a good way to healing :)

work
Lazy days go on till Monday, according to the doc... almost. A switch meltdown at workplace today, and it's all on my neck to tell (from home) what's happening with the network... Never buy unmanaged el cheapo hubs/switches. You have been warned. :)

fun
New 2.4 prepatch... It shouldn't take so long. It's time to refresh the romfs patches with the usual comments, and sneak in some bit for future features.

chalst: yes, bk is out there, what I really miss is source tarballs; and probably I need to get rid of the same aversion the BSD people look at the GPL... It's just somehow incomfortable.

life
Got a few days off, my throat is finally getting better, doc check is tomorrow. Slow days, I've never slept, and read books so much in months (just the phone keeps ringing... people miss the BOFH :)

fun
So much new sw is out now.. Samba, Ghostscript... No feedback on genromfs, just a falling number of downloads. Not an UI must-have tool, I confess. :)

XFree [4.1.0] sometimes leaves my console with garbage, sometimes with a darker palette on every exit on a basic NVidia card. Upgrade imminent?

life
My eyes wear out early, gotta check out a TFT "monitor", I think...

Also a revisit to doc is today, my throat is not all that better.

fun
Have to check out Subversion, and arch soon... Yeah, Bitkeeper is nice, but I crave for source :)

Advogato is slow sometimes, some of every ten page fetches stall for half a minute. Is it me, my country, or the site?

work
Another round of progress hacking. This time about triggers. It's a 4GL with some nice aspects and some terrible ones for people coming from another language...

genromfs 0.5.1 was finally released at the last weekend, after the not quite perfect 0.5 (which embarrassingly installed the man page in the binary directory). romfs finally has a web page at romfs.sourceforge.net. The release was also announced at freshmeat (unfortunately, not the bugfixed version), mirrored at ibiblio/metalab/sunsite. Right, I don't hate sourceforge :)

A few changes at work, and maybe I can stop playing catch up, and get up some speed. So, that was a hiatus. Let's see, how it goes on :)

Gosh, I'm seriously out of power to code something just for fun. Even less updating diaries, at least this one :) For the less interesting stuff, since the last update, I've been donating blood three times, went boozing about three times too (although no correlation).

romfs related todo, and mail is starting to pile up on me also. A few famous people, and a few from famous corporations are just waiting for my reply.. help! :) I start to think my project management abilities are somewhat limited.

Oh, and with a friend, we acquired a few of those 2x24 LCD's (pure HW, someone need to hack the interface); a few days later I re-discovered it is *the* common standard the lcdproc et al. is already using. I've some plans to use them what the screen is getting too small for.

metagato

Tried to catch up on... advogato diaries :) Weird, until now, only email was so information centered that I need a regular dose of it. And I feel a bit guilty for not mentioning anyone :) Well, that ChangeLog analogy is really familiar :)

Oh, this recent diary entries stuff is positively kewl :)

work

Not much done, seemingly just accomplished keeping everything working like it always was... Still no time to work on "real" useful projects.

fun

Managed to get a friend help bring a TV stand home. Now that room looks a bit less cluttered, all of the non-computerized sound-making devices are nicely packed below the TV. Funny how many people are struggling to get some furniture here :) Probably the change (move) forces people to keep a diary (ehrm. I mean ChangeLog), well, obvious..

Missed a few interesting programmes, I have a hard time being awake at midnight. Waking up in the real morning is a real killer. Must avoid it :)

Work

Long days. Yesterday I fought with a telecom provider; we have quit the contract for a few leased lines by the end of April. After we sent the fax, about an hour later, they started cutting the connections... This is the same company that is struggling with an ISDN30 connection since January, and is about to finish the project of installing about 300 feet of *temporary* cable from the closest distributing point.

Developer dreams

Did someone mention Forth? Funny. I'm also planning an embedded forth (something) for my own purposes, but it's quite unfinished. It has the most basic looping construct, and character output ready for i386 and m68k Linux. I have this weird attraction to embedded devices, and if I have some time, with a friend, we will build something capable of anything a smaller clock would do :) It's an interesting language, but these spawns later than '80 took a bit beauty of it (ehrm, postscript, GNU forth is a bit overkill too, IMHO).

I'm attracted to electronized sound making devices, starting with C64, Amiga soundtracker, I have a few Amiga hard disks stashed away waiting for saving the music from them, that's why I value the projects of data. I don't think that's wrong :)

Someone has a related project too here. He's working at a few more audio projects.