Older blog entries for miah (starting at number 18)

11 Jul 2003 (updated 11 Jul 2003 at 18:28 UTC) »

Woo, long time no update.

I'm employeed now. I'm the 'ASS' (Application Support Specialist) for chip.org now. I'm feeling alot better with the job situation. I really like this place. I've been here almost two months now, and things are going very well.

Did alot of updating on sunrise. helo did a bunch of updates to the installer and the bootdisk set, but he's disappeared so I haven't seen the changes yet. I forgot to reregister sunriselinux.{com,net,org} and now some pr0n site has picked them up. I find it slightly funny.

I'm back at my apartment with my gf. Things are going alot better on that front. I've been trying to sell off a bunch of my unused computer hardware. If you live in the boston area, email me and I'll forward you the list of stuff I'm trying to unload.

Also, if you're in the boston area, goto www.blu.org, or goto 2600. The local 2600 group is pretty cool. Lots of smart and fun people there. I run the local 2600 mailing list, it can be found at: http://www.sunrise-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/617-2600

I'm also happily typing this entry out on my purdy new laptop. My new employer got me a PowerBook G4 15.2" 1ghz/1gigram.. It's really nice. I must say I really like OSX. There are a few things I dislike though, and I kind of feel like there isn't a easy way to complain about it. I really need to look into that more though.

I've been reading lots of books lately. I'm just about finished with 'All tomorrows parties'. Its pretty good. Feels like it took a while to get into the good part, its good when you get there. Before that I read 'zodiac' which i really liked. I often found it hard to put down. I also read 'the ratmans notebooks' which is what the movie 'willard' was based on. I also liked that book. I highly recommend both if you can find them.

Well, this month has been hell. I'm still doing all I can to find gainful employment. I recently sent out my resume to a bunch of places and I'm once again getting the "Please send your resume in word format, so we can open it". I send out my resume in PDF, which is quite possibly one of the most Portable Document Formats.. sure its not free, but there is a viewer for every OS, so I don't know what these peoples problem is.

Haven't done much work with my distro. I have however written a small amount of perl code that controls the LED scroller at my friends apartment. I basically modified it and added in more 'meta-spys'.. The little pages where you can see what people are searching for on altavista, and metacrawler.. It now has support for 'altavista, metacrawler, kanoodle, galaxy.com, and ask jeeves'. I need to find more of these to add to it.

I've been kind of kicked out of my apartment by my GF. She thinks my motivation needs a kick in the ass and well, it does. I really wish there was another way to work things out, because this is very hard. We went out saturday and vistited some friends, drove around and talked, then went to a party. We both had a great time. The main issue is space, we have a smallish one bedroom apartment and since we've not had much cash we've been both at the apartment alot. The second issue is money, I'm still not working fulltime and I guess I haven't been looking hard enough. Finding a decent job right now is so hard.. I'm still working part-time for BWH, its fun, but I'd rather be doing something else, especially something where I get more than 10hours a week.

jfleck: You should grab either 'Ad-Aware' or 'Spybot Search and Destroy'. Both are great programs for windows that remove spyware, and the sex dialer programs. Adaware is currently undergoing a rewrite and thus hasn't been updated for a couple of months, but spybot has and its a great piece of software. It's really sad that there is a market for such programs, but atleast they're both free. I'm suprised the sex industry hasn't taken a tip from the anti-virus industry and started selling products that removed their crappy software. =)

I released a updated alpha of my distro. Still need to get the apt repository setup and upload the source rpms as well.

Hacked up a little script for rpm to do md5sum checking on source tarballs before extraction and compilation. I've started work on a similar script to do gpg signature checking as well. I will likely post both to my website by the end of the month.

Still alot of stuff to fix in the distro, but as only like 3 people run it I'm not very motivated.

A friend of mine that has been helping with the distro by maintaining our installer is currently porting it to uClibc. Hurray.

- Personal.

Last night I went to the Boston Linux Users group, which is held at MIT. Wow MIT is such a maze of a campus. Anyways, the talk was good and I won a door prize 'Practical C++ Programming' (a book I actually had on my amazon wishlist).

When we were leaving the LUG I ran into a friend who attends MIT and we went to the campus arcade for a while. After a couple games of Ms. PacMan and Pool we headed to the 'Thirsty Ear' to listen to some interesting idm. A study buddy of my friend showed up and I headed to the T to go home and on my way there I ran into another friend who was on his way to a club. We chatted for a bit on the sidewalk and then went on our way.

It was good to get out and actually the first time I'd left the house this week.

My job situation is getting annoying. I've seen searching for a decent full time posistion and still have not found anything. It makes me feel like I've worked my ass off for the last 6 years for nothing. Went from a good high paying job in San Francisco to a low hour(I work maybe 5-10hours a week) part time hourly posistion, and now I can go get a great job at McDonalds. I feel like I've chosen a great career path and have a great life ahead of me.

If anybody knows of a decent company in the Boston area looking for a Linux person, and you're not taking the job, please send info my way.

- Complain

I actually had sent my resume to ximian when I first moved here, and they were interested in me and called to schedule a interview. I returned the call and never heard back from them and of course they hired somebody else without ever even interviewing me. I feel kind of cheated on that. Anyways, that happend almost a year ago so it really doesn't matter. But it was the first time I had hope for a decent job in the last 2 years (since my job at penguin computing).

<skip rant about long time since i posted>

So anyways, I've been working on a bunch of things. Main thing is making sure sunrise will install properly on all x86 systems. We found that installation was bombing on some AMD systems, and other random boxes. I'm going to be testing my fixes on this soon. We're still obviously working out bugs in the installer, the code there hasn't gone far in the last 8months sadly.

I'm also going to be giving a speech at NEISUG in Feb about Linux Security. Should be interesting. My first big speech *butterflies* but I have plenty of time to prepare and its more for newbies so I should do fine.

Off topic kind of thing. I'm looking to repair a thinkpad I've got and cannot find much information. Its a 1161-260, and its got the thinkpad screen flicker problem. From what I've found its due to the cable going bad. I dont have alot of money to give to some repair shop. So if anybody knows of how to fix this, or a cheap place in the Boston area to get this fixed, please email me. The keyboard needs some fixing too, but I'd like to get the display fixed first.

Also, my opinion about this whole political drama that's been going on here at advogato.. If you people want to post drama, and troll, and start fights, please get a LiveJournal account and leave advogato. Thanks.

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.

18 Sep 2002 (updated 18 Sep 2002 at 16:50 UTC) »

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.

gilbertt writes:

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.

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