Older blog entries for miah (starting at number 14)

Hrm, its been a while since i posted.

Been working on the distro a bunch lately. Haven't released a new alpha, but that will happen soon. I just got some new sparc hardware too, so I'm in the busy process of making sure all my rpms work on both systems.

I'm pretty happy with my new sparcs though.. got 2 Ultra1's and a Ultra2.. pretty loaded systems, the U1's have 512megs of ram, and the U2 has a gig.. that may not seem like alot since pc ram is super cheap now, but considering these systems were free its pretty nice =)

Ok, back to work for me.

Been working alot on the distro. Trying to clean up any little bug I can manage to find. Finished implementing APT, now I just need to learn it a bit more and get the repository set up and test how well that works. I'm trying to get all this done before pumpcon so I can hand out some CD's there, need to get some people interested in the project. Finding decent documentation on apt seems to be pretty hard so far. Alot of the examples I've found don't seem to work with apt-rpm, even though apt-rpm is supposedly based off debian apt.. its quite strange. Hrm.. owell, I'll get it figured out eventually.

Urgh, been very busy this last week. Don't have much time to write today, but things are going well. One of my friends is planning on using Sunrise Linux for his project (a database thing). We're very excited and trying to pound out bugs.

How does not following redirects help, exactly? Surely the level of "hijack" required to add a redirect to the webserver configuration is just as high if not higher than that needed to replace the libc6 deb on the server itself.

Simple, PGP/GPG package signatures.

On another note. Finally got to more shell scripting. It's been a fun week learning more of the strange bash scripting techniques. Started implementing new functions into our initscripts, mainly for chrooted applications. Still have alot of work to finish off before pumpcon though. I hope we get there.

Been pretty busy these last few days. Working on writing new shell functions for my initscripts, as well as cleaning up existing scripts. Things should run alot better very soon.

I've been having some motivation issues lately. I think I need to get out of the house more.

A friend of mine offered me some free Sun hardware. I'm definately going to take him up on the offer, I just need to scrounge up the cash to pay for shipping from NM > MA. I'm getting two Sun Ultra1's and one Sun Ultra2. Both systems are high end setups. Looks like we'll be able to do a Sun port of the distro long before the Mac port, unless somebody offers up some G3+ hardware.

Work is kind of hectic lately, grant stuff. Have to update my resume, and some technical docs. I sure do hate dealing with tech docs.

While talking with a friend last night, about the hardware I'm getting, he said somthing to the effect of "its amazing there isn't some non-profit out there that handles hardware donations for free software". Makes me wonder, is there a place out there that does that? I know OpenBSD has a hardware donation setup, and they are a non-profit. But what about free software in general? It'd be great for a company to be able to donate all their hardware to that non-profit, get the tax write off, and see the hardware used properly instead of seeing it tossed into the garbage. Any thoughts on this?

W00, finally able to get back on and post. I had done a system upgrade and re-installed everything the otherday. However, I fogot to backup my cookies, and for some reason I couldn't remember what password I used for my advogato account. Thankfully, raph was able to email me my password.

We had a great meat at 2600 last night, with school in session we had about 25people show up to the prudential center.

Not much progress to report on the distro. Been working on chrooting apache and mysql. Quite a process.. I need to make sure that all the modules are working too.

Well last night I had a rather long argument with a guy I've known on irc for atleast 6 years.

It ended with him calling me a loser and a deadbeat.

Now, I realize its just irc, and that I shouldn't let it get to me. So I'm not. I'm letting that motivate me.

I started putting apt4rpm into the distro and already its dependancy hell. I'm going to blame perl. apt4rpm requires perl-XML-Simple, which requires XML::Parser and XML::SAX, which requires expact. Adding db1 isn't really much of an issue, but now I've also got to add a couple perl modules and another external library. I'm going to have to write the apt4rpm people and point out their missing dependancies, maybe they can atleast add it to the documentation.

I also setup internal dns at my house yesterday. Was getting sick of using IP's and I really hate managing a HOSTS file, especially since I do installs so often. In setting up maradns, I also had to write up some more initscripts for distro. So I got multiple things done which made me happy. w00.

Hrm, I think I just missed the bus too, and the next one isn't for an hour. Guess I get to walk to the Malden T station today. fun fun.

I've been debating over the last couple of days with apt4rpm. I'm thinking about adding it into the distribution, I however noticed that it has a dependancy they didn't list on their website, and thats db1.

We removed support for db1 from the distribution long ago since nothing used/required it. One of the things I like about the distro is that we don't include tons of unneeded packages.

So, I don't know if I should add db1 just so apt will compile and be happy. I'd really like to have the distro be apt enabled, its a great tool, but on the other hand, I don't want to add db1 just for apt.

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On another note, yesterday was great fun. Some friends invited me over to party in celebration of my 24th birthday. I can't honestly say I remember much of yesterday now, but I do remember having a whole lot of fun.

One of my friends got me a 'micropet' named 'bob'. Strange little robot..

wow.

I had a very fun day yesterday. I had a small bbq with a few friends in celebration of my upcoming birthday (its tomorrow). I turn 24. I grilled up some burgers, some garden burgers, and some morningstar chicken patties. Yum. We also had tater tots, lots of snack type stuff, and of course a great Carvel Ice Cream cake. It was alot of fun, but I didnt realize that 3 of my friends were highly allergic to cats and well.. I have 4 cats.

To top the evening off, we watched Adult Swim. I'm glad they picked up 'The Oblongs'. Sealab 2021 is still great, Harvey Birdman is very strange..

As far as Sunrise Linux is going, things are well. I've updated a few more initscripts, and have been urging more people to download the alpha and push some bug reports our way. One of our developers is working on a new look for the website, so we're pretty excited about that too. The new logo is awesome.

The bad things that happened.. The battery in my laptop has decided to stop working. This is not good, I do alot of work with my laptop and now I'm tied to a power outlet. If anybody knows a way to fix Sony Vaio Li-ION batterys, please send me info, or if you know someplace that sells them cheap..

Ugh, finacial issues again.. Money is the one thing I constantly stress about since losing my last well paying job. Right now I'm working part time for Brigham and Womens Hospital, in Boston. I work in the NRIMS lab (National Resource for Imaging Mass Spectrometry). Its a very fun job, doing alot of SysAdmin type stuff, and other fun creative things. Unfortunately, I only work 4-10hours a week. Going from a 65k+ salary position to a 10k hourly position is a very difficult thing, especially when you live in Boston and everything costs way more than it should.

So, the beginning of this month we sent in a payment for my car loan. Days went by and the bank called me asking where my payment was, we checked the bank and sure enough, the check hadn't been cashed yet. After having the bank call me 5 times asking where the money was, and letting me know my car was going to get repo'd, I paid a chunk with the "check by phone" service. We figured that the check was on its way back to us since it had been 3 weeks since we sent it out and hadn't got there yet. Our luck couldn't have that happen though, the check was deposited yesterday by my bank. So instead of one $350 payment this month, we made 2. (my payment is alot lower than that, but we had late fee's and such). My car loan is definately up to date now, but now we're $350 short. We're likely going to have to borrow money from family again.. Not fun..

If anybody knows of a company in the Boston area looking to hire a Linux geek, please send them my way. I have a copy of my resume on www.sunrise-linux.com.