Older blog entries for iddekingej (starting at number 20)

Elaya project

Many bugs fixed, more or less stable again. I try to get it work on WinXP/Win98. Hopefull new release in 2 months

Microsoft get the facts campain:

At micrsoft.com There is a German text about "Der Papierhersteller Koehler AG" (Produces paper) who migrated to windows (64bit) and Sap/R3 the microsoft . The text ( here) suggest they choosen for microsoft instead of linux. because only microsoft can garantuee security and investement guarantee for scalability.
But in the article here at computer worche the CFO of the company sais that when they had Unix knowledge in house that is wasn't usefull to go with windows strategy.

MSAccess
Currently i'm working on a program wich converts msaccess to another system , for example php etc..
Got the first result, some output for reports.

I don't know if something exists, but i think it is a nice intellectual challenge to do. I haven't used mdb tools also for making the task even more diffecult. But finding the file structure was really easier as expected. It only took me 3 weeks.
Yesterday I got some first output from the report conversion. It is not much, only 10% is implemented.
At home I don't have msaccess. So I needed to download mdb files from the internet and just uses a hex viewer.

O yes: It runs under linux, so no micrsoft software is used. No Msaccess or odbc is needed.

Note:code is not published yet,....

Elaya
Didn't do verry much with it this month. To bussy with the access project... shall do something again tomorrow.

Oh yes:
Get Firefox

bcrash

Today I continued with mine browser crashing program. I reworte it with php and postgresql. It should be installed at a web server and the just point your browser to the php script. The php script creates a random html page and after 500ms it reloads the page and display another html file until it crashed. There is also a script for automtic restarting the browser after a crash

The script was successfull with firefox, it crashed a couple of times.

The files can bedownloaded here

Note: This is a quick hack. Maybe it doesn't work or damages your computer.

Linux Advocacy
Today the server arived. A nice 3 GHZ Xeon /1GByte and a large giga sized mega-raid.Installation went fine.

I helped the sys admin to install linux (FC2 with KDE). He was verry
possetive and thought that is was really similar to windows.
(In the possitive way I think). The server is used as a database server (with Postgres).
Firefox
Donated 30$ for the ad campaign.
I read about a article about crashing browser because of mallformet html pages.
I wrote a little C program wich produce a file with random text and tags. It is 100% invalid html code, and I hoped (grinn) to crash firefox and mozilla.
But that didn't happen, instead it produced sometimes nice looking html pages. At the end it proves that a random generator can produce a better web site than Yahoo.

You can try, the source is available here

compile: gcc chk.c -o chk

run: ./chk <filename>

eg ./chk o.htm

Yesterday I installed fedora core. I have now WinXP,linux mandrake 10,Freebsd and Fedora Core 2 on one computer.

Installation was nice, it only messed with mine bootloader. WinXp is on the first partition and Mandrake on the second. FreeBSD and Fedora core 2 are on a second hard disk. It had allready Grub installed.Also I think the installer didn't look at the old installation. It noticed that there was WinXP on the firsts, but didn't look for an OS at the other paritions... I dunno.

FC2 is very nice, some of the system configuration tools are a little bit less than that of Mandrake. I don't like the software installer. It only list everything in Categories and not sorted by name. Because of this it is diffecult to find the right package.

Up2date is nice, but I had some problems. When cannected to a slow sever, it takes ages to download and the dependence check takes ages. Yum is fine, verry nice. While searching for a gui frontend, I discovered Synaptic. It can use the apt repositories. Works flawless, much better as the software installer delivered with FC2.

I also tried to compile The elaya compile, this went fine as expected.

Elaya project
Fixed some bugs
I keep working on the buildsystem only do bug fixing now on the compiler.
There is now a 'make install' after 4 years. I sounds silly,
but I never needed it for development really.
'configure' has more options now. It look much better now.

Linux Advocacy
Everything is going fast really. We all wanted to have Linux
so it wasn't really that diffecult. They just needed
a small push to go forward.

It isn't really big and it isn't about a lot of money. We
talking only about one computer. It will be used as a
database server. The organisation where I work for can't spend a lot of
euro's, because we need to reduce out expenses.
There are not many people in the organisation
who have knowledge about the things I need to
make desicion about.
Because all of this, I have a lot of responsebilities
when I make disicions in this
, but that isn't a bad thing.

Elaya project

New website layout and backend changed:here
(not yet satisfied but good enough for the moment)...

a link

Found interesting site del.icio.us, something with bookmarks... just look for you self..

If you wanne enjoy some mad uber trolling just search for 'bullmordt' with google.

Oh yes something about 'Clair Patterson'. Whatever the name suggest, he is a male not a female. Het was the first person who determend the age of the earth. During his inversitgation he discovered how much our athmospheer was poluted by led from fuel used by our cars. He started a campaign against led in petrol. It became a verry nasty fight because of the big $$$ companies (for example one called Ethyl). It damaged his carrier because those companies have a lot influence in the scientific institutes.

Some open source advocacy is starting to be succesfull... later more...

In an reginal dutch news paper there was an article about usage of opensource by Municipalities. The articel mentioned that
they save about 450 euro fot every desktop. One worrying thing is that there perception is to much Linux=Opensource.
Anyway some tests where successfull.

Yesterday I tried to use KDevelop. It looks nice, but i'm not enthusiastic. I din't use the Project Mangager
correcty wich gave me lot of problems. Some of those problems are bugs I think. I need to investigate this futher.

found an interesting article here. About how Stanislav Petrov saved the world for disaster.
Really scary. It shows also IMHO how dangeres it is to depend on computers.