Older blog entries for mobius (starting at number 163)

I'm writing a programming language. The spec is done, and now it's time to write an interpreter (or maybe even a compiler. but that's for when I'm *really* motivated).

Doing a web design contract for now. I need a real job. Bah.

Also, passphrases are considerably easier to remember over long periods of time. I still remembered the one for this site. It's impressive.

Oh, right, I have an account here. Still master, for no reason. Sigh.

Much has changed in my life, but you don't care. I see there's still a lot of pro-war bullshit in the diaries, so I'll probably avoid reading them for another few months.

I'd also forgotten how ugly the Advogato layout is. Yick.

I'll be moving on the 1st. I found out today. Ah, it's nice when some things fall into place. Too bad the rest of my life sucks.

Yah, there should be an apostrophe at the end of "users" in my article reply. Oopsies.

Spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why apache mysteriously stopped after an upgrade. AFAICT, I needed to have the order of two statements switched in httpd.conf. Very confusing. The worst part was that it was completely silent when dying. Ah well, fixed now.

I have now learned to use apt_preferences to pin packages at certain releases. Now I need to code up a cron job to figure out when those are updated, so I can schedule a mass-upgrade session.

I pinned both apache and exim, since I've had problems with both in the recent past(both config file things!), and I'm trying to run a pseudo-production server here. Hmm, I should pin mailman too. [done]. Nothing else is as critical as those packages.

Update: there were(are?) still some problems with my apache configuration. I got images working again, and allowed IDS to be executed. Bah, I say. Does anybody know exactly WTF happened to make apache so unhappy with me? Did it suddenly start obeying some guidelines that it was ignoring before?

Breaking news! Microsoft invents free software!

Has anyone else noticed how a lot of the cool 'new' features of the winXP desktop are copied from Gnome/KDE/every other linux WM. Hmm, those evil linux hippies must have stolen them from the pre-pre-pre-alpha release of XP!

Re my last diary entry: I was on campus and awake for 33 hours, then I went home. I'm back now; hopefully this silly assignment gets done soon.

I never thought that 35 large pizzas could disappear so quickly. Geez, you'd think we were starving students or something.

JavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajavaSNAPjavaaHAHAHAHA!

Let's see... I got on campus yesterday at about 10am... It's now about 5am. Only 19 hours so far. Not so bad. Tomorrow afternoon will be sleep time, (probably also on campus, but hey), and I have a midterm to study for on Friday. I'm setting myself up to crash, apparently.

Though I'm still awake, and on only one Coke and one Pepsi. And apparently my knee is now shaking due to caffeine. Hopefully I finish this program before the sugarhigh wears off.

The ECE server had a catastrophic failure today. Many, many files, gone. Possibly the backups as well. Crappy. Good thing I slacked last week and didn't start my signals lab.

Still slugging it out with Java. Time to learn how to do morphing.

I had to bend the phototransistor in my mouse a little, and now I have a very choppy x-axis response. Whee.

Bah, gestures. This is why they are not a good idea(IMNSHO):

Let's all play "Guess the gesture"! I just drew some shapes in the gimp, and dutifully copied them into ASCII. Here they are:

     ____
    |__    |___-_
  / |               |
 |                    \
/                      |
|                     /
 \                /
  |               |
  |              /
   \____---'
------------____
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|____             |
|      |____-----
            ___
             /   |
             |    |
             |      \
            /         \
            |            |
           /            |
      __-'              \
     |         ____     \
     |_-----'        `----\

These are the twisted products of my low-quality mouse, which seems to have issues with the X axis. Can _you_ write software to figure out what I was trying to draw?

I just fixed (for Microsoft values of fixed) a friend's b0rken win98 hard drive. It would no longer boot, apparently due to having the boot files deleted and/or win.exe. I dug up my old DOS super-rescue floppy, which contains everything to bootstrap a DOS machine to a usable state. It's been a while since I used edit; I think I need a new floppy with vi on it. It's an interesting project; create a floppy containing everything to make me productive in DOS. I'll be making disk images for general distribution when I'm done.:)