Older blog entries for const (starting at number 3)

Yesterday I came to sleep at 8am in the morning and woke up at 7pm today. It's terrible -- I'm a night animal.

I've discovered good news in my mailbox today: mgetty-1.1.21-to-28072000 has been released. I've built new RPM packages for KSI Linux and I'm happy to see that it is the first mgetty version for which I do not have to apply patches to make it build and work as desired. Only distribution-specific config.patch is applied. All corrections I have contributed to mgetty/vgetty are in place. So my patch in the article at Advogato is not actual any more.

But there are other problems: I'm tired to fight with mgetty+pppd combination. It seems like I have kernel/pppd/chat/setserial/mgetty conflict. Pppd had worked but I had to run ifup (or ppp-on) twice with a pause between tries. Now I've changed the chat script a little: modem dials from the first attempt, but I'm still not satisfied because I fail to find the precise reason for the problem. Everything worked ok at another machine with the same configuration, and other programs such as minicom (and chat itself executed without pppd) also share the line with mgetty without any problems. Well, I have not time to refine the problem, and anyway I plan to reinstall the system (BlackCat Linux instead of KSI Linux). Let's see...

Another thing I'm tired of: my provider sucks. And any other provider in our town is even worse. Why am I living in Siberia?

It wanted to know how zlib compression is integrated into the TridiaVNC. I've got several files from their source via CVS and now I know. Exactly as expected: their implementation is not very efficient: the context (dictionary) is not being saved between screen updates. Due to this fact it would be easy to outperform their compression ratios.

http://www.hyperreal.org/raves/vrave/ -- I did not expect that people at hyperreal.org are still updating web pages related to vrave/telechat chat server software. I'd like to thank them one more time for the telechat-1.0 source which was the base for my current project. It's great that they had released that code under the BSD-like license.

And I'm glad that hyperreal.org knows about my project although I have not announced it too widely (it's because I plan to change user DB format in the nearest future, and after that it will be a better time to make announcements).

bzip2 is pathologically slow on data which consist mainly from small repeated patterns such as "ababababab..." or "ccccccccccc...". I know that it's a usual behaviour of block-sorting compression algorithms, but there are workarounds to prevent that... I'm finally tired to wait for a whole hour sitting in front of Pentium II to get a 216K archive...