Older blog entries for egad (starting at number 6)

Did major dissection on Dia today. Moving forward on the custom arrow front. Need to check on the mailing list and see what they think of the design.

Spent big $$$'s on the Lego Mindstorms kit. Came to the realization that I don't have enough serial ports on my workstation. So I found where I left my laptop and am currently getting a quick debian install on there so I can use it's serial port.

Ahh the wonders of modern computing.

Back to work and more database cruft. Actually it was more of a modperl day.

Got a new copy of GRASS and downloaded a whole bunch of geographical data on to a couple ZIP disks. Map making fun.

More data movement.

Also much perl programming.

Must now sleep, brain taxed beyond capacity.

Moving databases are not hard when you are just moving them around. They become increasingly more difficult if you decide that the whole design of the database needs to change.

Add to this the fact that all of the old data needs to come along too, and the fact that the guy who wrote the orignal code is probably getting ready for finals and is over 200 miles away. That's what I did today.

The documentation for making debian packages is severely lacking. Someone needs to write a book equivalent to Maximum RPM for debian packages.

Went to the grocery store. Made the mistake of leaving around sunset. Since I don't really have a car I walked over. This time of year in Reno the temperature drops like a stone as soon as the sun sets. So I got a fine taste of the cool.

Fun fact: Keeping your hat on top of your monitor makes it quite toasty when you have to walk to the grocery store.

Well enough of the verbosity.

Hmmm...

Made some custom apache rpms so we can use rpm at work and not have to deal with the redhat way of configuring it.

Also put rpms for Quicklist on the ftp site. While I was at it I started to redesign the site so it isn't dun brown, and all the info is on one really long page.

Starting to look at how to build debian packages.

Lately it seems my life has revolved around packaging. How quaint ;).

Still having a bit of a quandary.

Which is better rpm or deb. Debian has apt which is vastly superior to rpmfind, but rpm is a very easy to tinker with and standardised framework. Next step is to see what it would take to have apt play with rpms.

More mucking around the insides of Debian. Got my build environment back to normal thanks to apt. And sound support thanks to ALSA.

Now for some real work.