Advogato blog for link

19 Mar 2001

Mon, 19 Mar 2001 05:58:36 GMT

The wireless link is now up and working. One week, three kernel builds, two SSH tunnels, and a couple of bouts with ipchains later then expected; but I'm finally Wireless Baby! Yeah! :-)

8 Mar 2001

Thu, 8 Mar 2001 02:44:11 GMT

Woohoo! I'm being productive! :-)

By a fit of productivity -- and some decent patches from various Nice People® :-) -- I've managed to pare the TODO List down to 29 from 34. There are still some easy pickings left, and several new features that could be implemented with a minimum of fuss.

I'd really like to do some "refactoring" on it though. The architecture is very Perl 4 -- though I've added quite a few Perl 5 "isms" in the individual pieces -- and is becoming unmaintainable and seriously sub-optimal. A good first goal would be to make it run under mod_perl and support recursive validation ("spidering"). Once it's there it might be more fruitfull to actually design future direction.

Anyways, the plan going forward is to get rid of the remaining "low-hanging fruit" on the TODO; beef the TODO up with new features; and pare it back down again until it only contains obscure bugs and "Blue Sky" items. That should be enough to keep me occupied for a while. Once that's done, mod_perl and Recursive Validation is high priority (unless XML Schema inserts itself into the queue at that point!).

BTW, my wireless (802.11b) connection was installed today...

...and almost, but not quite, utterly failed to work. :-(

26 Feb 2001

Mon, 26 Feb 2001 01:56:18 GMT

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the docs I mentioned in the last entry are now in CVS and pending for approval from ger.

21 Feb 2001

Wed, 21 Feb 2001 13:37:12 GMT

Uh oh! My mother reads this diary... :-)

How do I get myself into these things? Thinking I'm being really clever, I muck about with OpenSP until I actually get it to build on Red Hat 7.0. Before my sanity kicks in I've volunteered to make RPMs of it. *gulp* I haven't even touched a .spec-file, much less built one from scratch!

Fortunately for me, Matthias Clasen had already made one so all I had to do was the "rpm -tb" bit. Saved by the bell! :-)

Note to self: Next time, try not to promise stuff you have absolutely no idea how to actually do.

In other news, things seem to be starting to move again over at the Validator. ger has allready applied some of the backlogged patches (the http vhost fix! *yay*) and I'm getting close to checking in some docs (no, really! I'm writing documentation too. :-) ).

Next step is to try using OpenSP -- which can report relevant clauses with errors -- instead of SP (with Liam's patches) so we can catch them and output something pretty instead. Might be a good time to shoehorn in my ESIS parser module and adopting a more OO style.

Anyways, since we've been at a dead halt here for a year or so, most of the requested features are bound to have slipped my mind. If anyone has stuff they want worked on, email me.

19 Feb 2001

Mon, 19 Feb 2001 07:05:37 GMT

I love the Internet!

Absolutely, positively, adore it.

Back in September last year I posted one of my usual "link Bitching & Moaning" diary entries. In it, I happened to mention the trouble I'd had with the embedded Intel PRO/100 Ethernet adapter on my new development system. Today I got an email from the South Pole(!) from someone having the same problem and no Linux geeks handy to help, but who had found my diary entry. [For anyone else having problems, the driver can be found here or by simply going to the Drivers section of Intel's website]

I love the Internet! :-)

22 Sep 2000

Fri, 22 Sep 2000 04:01:01 GMT

Lo and behold, the Missing Link hath returned! Or, quite possibly, "returneth". :-)

Damn! Two full weeks since my last diary entry and the worst part is that this is becuase there has been absolutely nothing to write for two weeks. :-(

The new G4 finally showed up and I'm a happy camper. My favourite email client, Mailsmith, is finally on hardware that can support it (it's a bit resource hungry) and I'm starting to catch up on email again. Will make a nice change to the last year or so when I've been keeping up on work-email using just Micros~1 Outlook and pretty much ignoring everything else.

Mucking about a bit, and asking a cow orker for pointers, I finally figured out that when Intel talks about the "PRO/100" Ethernet controller they don't actually mean the "PRO/100" Ethernet controller. What they really mean is "an Ethernet controller in the PRO/100 family". *sigh* The standard eepro100.o module won't work on my particular box. I had to go fetch a new e100.o driver from their web site.

When I finally found it, everything was great, but figuring out that "PRO/100 ne PRO/100" and then finding the requisite driver was a royal PITA. Anyways... Bygones!

This means I now have the basics for my new development system. I'm still lacking sound support (AC7 drivers, anyone? Alsa?), but I can probably get around that with a spare sound card I have lying around. I don't need that glorious sound; if I can play CDs without the more glaring artefacts I'm good to go.

The other snag is connectivity. The local Telco keeps promising DSL, but it has yet to materialize and dialup charges are killing me! If I don't get anything definite from the telco I'll have to buy either an ISDN router (Cisco 803? Low end Zyxel?) or an ISDN card with Linux support and use my RH box as a router. The latter is probably the best bet since I'll probably have to do that anyway when they finally roll out DSL around this dump.

In brighter news, I've been out flat on my back with the flu for the last week. You wouldn't believe the sheer bloodyminded malice of the bugs that are going around up here these days. I've been hurting all over and seeing pink elephants doing summersaults in my bookshelves.

How is this good news? Because I think the week of enforced inactivity has cured me somewhat of tendencies towards burnout that has been nipping at my heels lately. Now that the worst is over, I'll take my runny nose and only-occational-cough back to work and I'm looking forward to it. :-)

While I'm at it, I'm going to set a new precedent for myself. I've mostly ignored the tendencies around here to perpetrate Conversation by Diary up to now. Mostly because I don't usually have the time to keep up with recent diary entries, but also because I think it's a horribly inefficient way of communicating. Even a "Web Board" would be better, but a traditional mailinglist or a newsgroup would have been perfect. Anyways, I've decided to make an effort to keep up and see how it works out. So...

ian: Apple didn't include any of the GNU toolset in Mac OS X because rms insisted they'd have to open the whole OS -- including Quartz, Carbon, Cocoa, the works! -- if they did that. However, the tools are available in Darwin and you can easily get them from Apple's web site and install them on your Mac OS X box.

7 Sep 2000

Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:25:06 GMT

This was supposed to be an experiment in journalling software development, but it's turning out to be "link Bitching & Moaning". :-(

My new Linux box arrived yesterday... Guess what? It doesn't run Linux!

Compaq went and switched chipsets on me (440BX->815E?) and now I have a rilly rilly cool box; with no sound and no network. Strangely enough, though, it gets an SMP kernel from the RH Installer. I know the Coppermine is supposed to be fast, but come on! :-)

If anyone has gotten Red Hat 6.2 to behave on one of Compaq's new 733MHz Deskpro EN SFF models (with "Integrated Intel® PRO/100 VM Network Connection" and "Integrated Intel® Audio with Premium Internal Speaker") then, please, do give me a holler. Without networking I'm dead in the water and without sound (read: music) I can't code worth a damn.

Maybe there's something in Rawhide, or possibly Mandrake... *sigh*

Oh, and there's still no sign of my new G4MP. 2 x *sigh*

OTOH, The Apache Foundation's XML Parser Project is promising to release Xerces with Perl bindings RSN. They claim to be supporting XML Schemas and, if it actually works, it's bound to save me countless hours of sweating over the XML Schema Recommendation (the W3C couldn't write a readable spec if their life depended on it :-().

2 Sep 2000

Sat, 2 Sep 2000 02:35:53 GMT

arrgh!

I shouldn't have ordered new hardware. It's taking way too long to get here and while I'm waiting I'm not getting anything done. The machines that were just fine before seems so old and slow now that I know I'll have new ones soon. :-)

30 Aug 2000

Wed, 30 Aug 2000 01:40:24 GMT

Quick update on the Validator. Code is getting cleaner and is pretty much in a runnable state now. I have a copy running on <URL:http://www.tss.no/~link/ val/> and a snapshot at <URL:http://www.ts s.no/~link/dist/val.tar.gz>. I still have charset mismatch problems to deal with as well as fleshing out ";imgonly" and XML-output support, but it should be pretty much all downhill from here.

Sean Palmer raised the question of XHTML Families and XML Schemas and I've offered to take a look at the problem. If it turns out to be easy (I doubt it) I'll probably include it in this round of sweeping changes (Gerald will kill me! ;D). Otherwise I'll try to work on that next.

I feel a rant about reinventing square wheels coming on every time someone mentions XHTML and the problems with DTDs to me, but I'm trying to keep my mouth shut as I don't really know enough about the subject to venture an opinion. Don't worry though, I'm saving up on vitriol until such time as I feel I'm on firm ground... :-)

28 Aug 2000

Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:09:13 GMT

Another four days gone by without any work done. Thursday and Friday got lost in incessant Day Job Demands and as it turns out I'd promised the SO I'd attend a wedding this weekend and had to go out of town. Shabby hotel; cost a fortune; no Internet access. /me is not happy! :-(

So now I'm back, but looking at the duty roster it doesn't seem too bright Monday through Wednsday. I've got Thursday and Friday off, but since I'm on Hell Rotation (don't ask!) this weekend I'll probably have to spend the time doing IRL-stuff.

Speaking of IRL-stuff, I'm planning on beefing up my hardware pool. Current plan is to get one of those kick-ass MP models from Apple (the 2x450MHz model) to deal with email/news/"Office"-type stuff and the 733MHz model from Compaq's Deskpro EN SFF line for a Linux box. None of them are actually typical hacker hardware, but they seem to suit me like a glove. It's going to cost me an arm and a leg, but I think it's worth it. My current hardware just won't cut it anymore; especially since I've got to return both my Linux systems to my former employer. I've already stalled much longer then I should. That leaves me with just a Macintosh Performa 5400/160 (160MHz PPC 601 CPU).

Of course, it all depends on what my bank thinks of the idea and my bank, it seems, is extremely slow in making up it's mind. :-(

Note to self: Look into adding "Watch" and "Watched" options to mod_virgule!

There are several people whose diary I'd like to keep watch on, but no easy way -- short of well organized bookmarks, of course :-) -- to keep track of them. If mod_virgule let you "Watch" a set of diaries, or possibly Accounts, for changes it'd be much easier. It could probably be listed on each page "This person is watching.../This person is being Watched by..." in addition to the Certification listings.