Older blog entries for jonas (starting at number 22)

Most of yesterday and today was spent in a frenzy trying to get things ready for my departure tomorrow. Updated the Debian installation on my laptop, fooled around with Linux kernels 2.4.x and PCMCIA. Finally got things back together again and is now enjoying a computer with an up-to-date installation of most of everything on it. Re-configured Gnus (I seem to do this every time I go away..) and set it up to work in unplugged mode.

Copied all the sourcecode I'm working on to the laptops home directory, made fresh CVS checkouts, installed all Perl modules I could even think of a faint use for, just in case, and rejoiced when I got a message telling me that my PAUSE account is ready for use.

I'm leaving tomorrow and won't be back until next sunday, so don't expect much updates until then.

As predicted, I didn't get to play much with C++ today. I've decided on a pet project though; adding some functionality to an existing C++ project.

goingwhere: In response to paypalwarning.com, I'd like to say that they're probably right in everything they say. I don't really use Pay Pal, fortunately. Sometimes I still think it would be good to find a US bank account though.

Anyways, the problems that paypalwarning.com mentions about their support reminds me of a problem I've had with Juno Internet Services. You see, every now and then I get a message from their abuse department telling me about a spam message that they say originated from my network. Looking at the headers, the spam messages always come from completely different networks.

Not only is this a problem, but they also send the messages to bug-jwhois at gnu.org, which is an address specifically for reporting bugs about the GNU jwhois program. This had me confused for a while and I didn't receive a reply to my inquiries sent to them aside from an automatic response telling me they'd look into whatever it was I wrote to them about.

After a few months though, I figured out that they must be using jwhois in their backend systems for finding out who to send abuse reports to. When they call jwhois with invalid options, or no options, it will answer with some information telling the caller about the syntax he or she should use. This syntax ends with this;

Report bugs to bug-jwhois@gnu.org

Their system apparently matches this email in the belief that it's a valid address to report spam to and offers it to the abuse person who then sends the message to me through that address.

Now, I still havn't received a message from them about this, and I must have mailed both Juno and their Internet uplink 6 or 7 times over as many months. I havn't received a letter in almost a month though, so I'm hoping that the strongly worded letter I sent to them via the normal postal service actually made a difference. Of course, I still havn't received a reply to that message either.

Regarding the job I went to look at; the woman I spoke to said I most likely had the qualifications for the job but had problems with two things; (1) that I don't have a drivers license yet, and (2) that I'm apparently about six years too young for their taste. The second one I can't do very much about, but the first one I can and should. I only need to find about $5,000 or so to get my personal economy back on track. This should be fun..

This has bugged me for a while, but I havn't bothered to rant about it yet. Paypal. I have an account (with the imaginatory name jonas@gnu.org), but I have no way to withdraw money from it (yet). The reason? With Paypal, you can only withdraw money to a US bank. This means that I (a) have to find a US bank to open an account in, and (b) find a way to transfer funds from the US bank to my normal bank.

Why is this impractical? Because I'm in Europe. I can't very well fly over to the US just to open a US bank account to use for withdrawing Paypal funds. The solution? Find a bank that allows foreigners to open accounts from abroad. This seems pretty much impossible.

Next rant; C++. I decided that my first step will be C++, from which I will then evolve into learning Java. The reason is that I took one look at C++ and decided it is crap, so I might as well learn it first and then be able to appreciate the beauty (relative!) of Java, instead of being depressed by the uglyness of C++ after having learned Java. Maybe I'll find time to finish up C++ tomorrow, but there's a possiblity it will take until friday until I can find the time for it.

Tomorrow will be spent on two tasks; first going to a drivers school and getting some papers so I can eventually (within four years) get a drivers license. Eventually, I may need a drivers license if I'm to work more than 10-20 kilometers from home. This leads to the second task of tomorrow; visiting a city roughly 70 kilometers from where I live to see if the job as IT manager is something for me.

And finally, something to relate to yesterday; after I wrote the entry I spent some more time tinkering with OpenAFS and eventually got it to work with surprisingly little effort and only two or three reboots. Not only am I able to access my own AFS cell, but I've also made a mountpoint for Stacken's (stacken.kth.se) AFS cell, so I can see their public information, which is a nice nicety of AFS.

Someone that posted a diary entry here on Advogato was working on domain registry stuff. Who was that? Show yourself! I've lost your name and I'm interested in knowing what you're up to.

Also, I've decided to wet my hands with Java. Beware.

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.