Older blog entries for jrf (starting at number 16)

Wheeeee

Another day, oh wait its the last workday of the year! As if all of the bullshit that happened this year won't matter come the 1st of Janruary?

I wish.

Screw work. Lets look at programming, shall we? Today I spent debugging, as I have the last 2 days. My friend and I are searching for a ghost in the kernel and we still have yet to find that slippery bastard. I almost gave up hope until he brought me around. So I went back at it and now we know where (we have narrowed down to a couple of files) the problem may lie.

This is what it is all about, a pal,, some beer and persistance (granted . . . the beer helps).

So yes. We like it, but without our friends, we could not do it.

I have not posted anything here in a long time. That much should be obvious. Over the past year I have successfully moved a huge operation from one site to another (in a short amount of time) done some stuff that I never thought I could. My skills as a systems programmer have finally started budding since my involvement with NetBSD and my administration/architectural skills have exploded. Probably because I have just been put into some tight situations and had to learn things sort of on the spot. I guess as time goes on I will think about being a little more proactive about my account here :) Some of the more interesting stuff I have been up to was kernel testing on the current branch for some speed improvements and queing software. I also have been working on signed executable/lib support with a friend (in kernel). Piled on top of all of that has been some pretty great documentation work. The holidays have left me pretty refreshed, hopefully that will help me keep up my advogato account :-)

Work is killing me, we are transferring systems to another set of systems at another site. Just as this is about to kick off, I am starting a co-author project on a book about performance tuning. Suffice to say I have not had nearly as much time to devote to working on software and systems in my spare time as I normally would. Not too mention school. Oh well, this is how it goes sometimes. Besides, wouldn't life be boring without all of this stuff?

Geez I noticed this huge gap in my diary entries, here is some stuff I have been doing over the last few weeks:

• contrib's DNS and using vi material to the NetBSD Guide.
• I also submitted a package to NetBSD (yes all by my wee-self).
• general list/chat room helping out stuff.
• Installed an irc server, anonftp server, DNS server and thttpd server all on my home internet gateway.

So I have been active, but usually that list would be 3 times as long :-) The cool thing about the last item was I transferred a lot of that experience right to my UNIX networking job. So the proof is in the pudding, learning at home helps.

I decided to put my diary back here since I am using cvs to maintain my personal site.

Not much has happened in awhile, I have been in and out of goings on the big wide world and focusing on getting my home network straightened out. Which I finished, so I guess it is time to get back to other work.

I release newsfetch-1.3 but heard somehwere that another release may have been posted, if that proves true I will remove my version. Otherwise the only other interesting stuff I have been entertaining is writing a version of mmw for NetBSD.

It has been a long time since I made an entry. A lot has been going on that a few folks here know about. Basically I had to decide on whether or not I wanted to leave the company I worked for or take a relo and a new task. I ended up accepting the relo and task for a variety of reasons - mainly that I need to do some other things before I change careers, now is not my time. I did learn a lot in the job hunt though, working in Open Source does help, heck, even making mention of advogato perked a few people.

Now onto the meat, my last task was updating some tiny utils, with that done I moved onto wrapping up setting up a NetBSD/sparc (sparcstation 5). I ended up actually sort of porting elvis so I have volunteered to package it, which has proved to be rough because of my job stuff I have kept putting it off. I really want to do this because I am interested in learning a little diversity. I have figured out how to wrap up GNUlike packages but not NetBSD ones.

I also finally cranked out some OutRider content. Otherwise I have actually been working and studying (yes I am just as shocked as you).

I did have a brief discussion with jbowman about possible favoritism in advogato. He wanted to know why I ranked him as Journeyer since I knew some of his friends, my answer was I believe being a contributor is more than just code, there is a great deal of spirit in it, and he is a Lead Developer. So I did not see him as an apprentice.

We both agreed it might be good to add a rung or two but advogato seems to be working. We know of some people (it may be one actually) who have attempted to break the system and it has survived attack. So I guess we are just in wait and watch mode.

YAQD, relearned how to write kernel modules, had a problem with a charachter device though, have to play with it some more tomorrow. Spent the afternoon learning alg theory (joy).

Figured I would spend the late evening playing with python - the language that is.

Thinking the first system information part I write should be console based first. Get some sample information I want into some data structures then pile on the GUI later.

One thing I need to clarify is I am not making a monitor - plenty of those already exist. Just something that gets hardware information and puts into a GUI-thingy. Yes I know GNOME and KDE have this, I want to do it in python/tk so it won't matter which one a user has.

Of course, that is if I ever do it!

Ah yes and my publisher got back to me today, everything looks good to go, once I get a timeline established I will begin work.

Yipes!

Must code, will alleviate anxiety, Must code, will alleviate anxiety . . .

Pretty quiet day today. I took a lot of time to certify a lot of different people. I pretty much follow lilo's philosophy of bumping people who have potential and helping out with those already well in their rating or on their way to another.

No news on the publishing stuff but interestingly enough, there seems to be an industry-wide affliction. A fellow writer had a serious downturn in luck recently (waaay worse than me) and I sincerely hope all goes well for him.

Stewing on OutRider content for September. have a few ideas but have to bounce them off of some folks first.

Still planning some big home installation/reconfiguration activites this week end (see prior entries) but school has been tough, I am having difficulty concentrating due to some professional problems, this will probably affect my coding as well - actually it already has.

Things will work though - one way or the other - they have to really it is just a matter of getting from AtoB - or is it [a-b]?

Today I added a lot of styles to ye olde homepage. Nothing too fancy just basic style formatting.

Spent most of the day creating several resume formats for folks as well and had a good time conversing with jlf.

I realized diskinfo could use a couple of code cleanups and enhancements like showing the size in MB, GB or TB instead of raw bytes. I think I will back burner it until I get some work done on the py/tk sysinfo thing.

Otherwise a regular day at the job.

Well, what a vacation. I got a severe rash (an allergic reaction is what we are all guessing but who knows) that may send me to the local doctor.

Oh well, everyone else had fun which IsAGoodThing(tm).

Otherwise I have the following activities lined up for the next week:

1. study and get a lot of schoolwork done, it is a long road to the masters!
2. check out interrupt.pm for anything I think it might need
3. at the end of the week install NetBSD 1.4.2 on a SPARC5
4. install NIC on Linux system and recompile kernel to see it
5. get NIC and SPARC a talkin'
6. add extensions to mmw for swap - or create a swap watcher (hmm)
7. start prototyping the python/tk sysinfo GUI thingy - my protyping to production (in C, C++ and Perl5) is usually 5 days - we shall see with python/tk!
8. keep my eyeballs on the various lists for helping out . . . duh I already do that.
9. write OutRider content for September - lets see if I can do it on schedule this month!

crap that is a lot of stuff - thats cool - how else would I like it? Boring - I think not!