Older blog entries for jonas (starting at number 18)

Having TAGS files for most of your sourcecode really improves your coding. There's only a few things I miss, but I may implement them tomorrow. Should be a nice exercise in elisp and will make it much easier for me when working on multiple sub-projects simultaneously. Command of the day is therefore M-., and if you havn't bound your Window keys to M yet, you should do so now. (the menu window thingy key is bound to Compose of course).

Also been toying with Coda and OpenAFS and looked at Arla and OpenGFS. I've pretty much ruled out any AFS implementation for my purposes, but I'll try to make OpenAFS work just for the heck of it. Then I might also toy with OpenGFS to see how that works in depth, but I'm telling you, compiling everything on a Pentium 133 is tiresome.

kevindumpscore: The standard you're looking for is called TeXInfo :-)

I'm writing this entry early, because I don't expect anything even mildly interesting will happen today. I have now received tickets in the mail though for the trip I'm going to take next week. It will keep me occupied for pretty much most of the week and I won't get back until next sunday.

In other interesting news, someone told me that I ought to apply for membership in the GNOME Foundation. I'm not sure if I would qualify or if I would have anything to do as a member though. Opinions welcome.

Looked at XML/XSLT/XHTML. I'm still not convinced it's a good idea. Or rather, I think it's a very good idea, but I'm not convinced it will catch on in the industry at large. I've still got a fresh mind about it though so we'll just have to wait and see. This relates by the way with what I said about that all content management systems suck. No system I've looked at for the web, like Zope, PageKit, AxKit or whatnot, has really interested me. I'm sure they're good, but their use seems limited to me right now.

One of the main events of today was giving our cat a bath. This didn't turn out to be such a major problem as we first envisioned. The cat actually went into the bath voluntarily, which surprised us both. When we was going back to our appartment after having been shopping, we were surprised by rain though and in the end we were the ones who most looked like soaking wet cats.

Rest of the day spent mostly in the *scratch* buffer of Emacs trying out various elisp hacks. I finished Bob Chassells introduction and will now take on my .emacs to see how I can redisorganize it. This will have to wait until tomorrow though because I intend to spend some time doing nothing, or at least doing surprisingly little for the rest of the evening.

Today has been spent mostly with answering a backlog of emails. I've also begun playing with Emacs Lisp more actively after Georg Greve sent me a small function that sparked my imagination. You see, I've never really gotten around to learning Emacs Lisp from the basics. Sure, I can patch my .emacs to make it do interesting things, but I always end up fiddling with things longer than I have to because I don't understand the basic structure and get things mixed up.

So I picked up a copy of Bob Chassells excellent Emacs Lisp introduction and has gotten one third through it by now, but most of that time has been spent playing with my own .emacs as I learn new Emacs Lisp features.

The time between finishing reading my email and answering messages up until I started playing with Emacs Lisp was spent in Perl. I have been working on some rather simplistic Apache modules, so I took some time finishing them up, adding comments, formatting the code, rewriting for clearity and then applied for a PAUSE account so I can push them into CPAN eventually.

Note of the day: all content management systems suck.

On a different note, I've learned Python. Or, at least the basics of it and enough to be able to write a tool to do exchange rates for a local LysKOM conference system. I'm likely to upset a lot of people now, but I really, REALLY, find Perl code easier to read than Python. I guess my brain just strips out all whitespace automatically, which makes Python a real pain ;-)

On another different note, here are the latest pictures of mine and Kandras cat Strössel. :)

Some years ago, when the Linux kernel was still at version 0.99, I took a few days to assemble my own GNU/Linux system. It was a great deal of fun that, but it was tedious work, so I went back to working with Slackware, which at least had all the basics precompiled. When I found myself with time enough last week to build a new computer from scrap parts I thought it might be fun to do it once again, with a twist.

The twist is that the computer is a PC without a monitor. I only have one monitor, which I use for my workstation, and I think it's a waste to put a monitor on a PC that I will use to play with just because someone once thought that serial consoles didn't need to exist on a PC. So I assembled a boot floppy which contained syslinux and the linux kernel, set up for serial console support and booted on that.

I must admit though that I had to borrow a monitor for a few minutes to configure the BIOS. That continues to annoy me to no end. But once that was sorted out, I was able to boot into a floppy shell, configure the network enough to pull down a root image I had prepared earlier with enough static binaries to be able to pull up a working system.

Reboot, into the real system, configure network, get more software and recompile them dynamically and voila, a brand new system. Let me point out that the system I build was made completely from parts of the GNU project, except for some specific parts that I consider to be part of the Linux kernel support (like ifconfig, route and so on). So if this is not a GNU/Linux system, I don't know what is.

I'll probably continue to add software to it, like Perl and nvi, but it will always be a GNU/Linux system, just like any of my other servers and workstations.

A quick update is probably in order. Wildebeest is doing so and so. The company is surviving but I'm barely, so I need to do more things that actually generates money. What those will be, I don't know. What I need to do, which I'm feeling guilty about not doing, is spend more time reworking the GNU website on a technical level. Maybe some nice company will step up to help me do this. :-) At least, that's what I hope will happen and am working towards that end.

In other news, jwhois was released as version 3.0, and then 3.0.1 the next day. Here's the downside of having 768MB of RAM in your workstation; almost all memory which you allocate has never been used before and is therefore filled with nulls. This means that you don't notice WHEN YOU FORGET TO COPY THE TRAILING NULL FROM A STRING. This is something that should not be allowed to happen. Fortunately, other people were quick to notice it (though, I noticed, noone offered a solution).

So Wildebeest is now official-official, rather than just semi-official. It's been some interesting days since I started telling people about it and I've gotten a lot of positive reactions.

My worst fear right now is that the US will retaliate.

*Zap!* Just felt a need to write something at Advogato. Actually, I feel a need to write a lot of things right now. It's a quiet urge that's not being satisfied writing only two Free Software related articles a month. Where are the companies willing to pay for hackers to write about Free Software?

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