Older blog entries for mperry (starting at number 11)

Very pleasant now in the East Bay. I read a interview with Tridge at linux-mag which was a good read about his take on most everything.

Since I am officially on vacation, I have been doing a lot of vacation type stuff but still seem to have a few work tasks now and then. One interesting thing lately has been exploring a few window managers which caught my interest before. Primarily, fvwm2, blackbox, enlightenment; but I also have used icewm on occasion. There are so many choices that I can pretty much spend a day on each one I am interested in. Learning about fvwm2 was on today's list. I am nowhere near a pro, but I learned a bit about its .fvwm2rc file and how to exec things in it. Exploring window managers using debian is a breeze! My alltime favorite is still windowmaker because perhaps I have used it for so long and it seems to do what I need. I think I could use fvwm2 also though.

Tomorrow, I think I will learn a bit about how icewm does things

On the portable, ipaq side, I have been playing a lot lately with the pre5 release of familiar linux. Things are working quite well as I have noted before.

On the play side, I am finding several games to be very good challenges for my admittedly marginal game playing abilities. I really like simcity and Alpha Centauri; but Descent claims both my time and some sense of vertical and horizontal displacement.

Thanks go out!

Last day of work for 2 weeks! Woohoo! Not to sound too mysterious, but I was able to do something for someone that is rated as a Master and is responsible for a lot of help in what I do. I ain't gonna say what that "something" is but I think the mystery person knows who he is. Suffice to say that it gave all of us a great deal of pleasure to do this.

Thanks to that mystery person who is also rated as a Master in these prestigious settings for all the help with ThinkPads, desktops, servers, and everything.

Minimal Notes on the Work Thing-

On the workside, I think there will be a lot of interest in some of the things we are into now. The real news will have to wait a bit longer but its very cool and I think people will find it challenging, interesting, and provocative.

Few days have gone by since a diary entry. Been busy. Work is very challenging these days and I'm glad I have some people around that make it interesting and enjoyable.

That's about it for now.

Hey ianmacd ! Yeah, the IPAQ stuff is rather expensive. I ended up buying a dual pcmcia sleeve so I could run a 1g microdrive and a orinoco wireless card at the same time. The sound system on the IPAQ with headphone engaged is truly remarkable. The pre5 release seems to be working quite well for me these days. The microdrive is mounted as /dev/hda1 and it has a few hundred mb of mp3s on it. The power does drain rather fast but the sleeve does have an extra battery. One thing I have noticed is that the IPAQ will drain the battery down if a wireless card is left in it. The new 38xx models sound totally cool! I read on one of the mailing lists off handhelds that there would be an official announcement about running familiar on the new ones. They have gorgeous screens and also have an SD slot built in. They are expensive toys though and the new one is no exception from some of the pocketpc sites I visit.

Today I got to play almost three hours of Loki's Alpha Centauri. Very nice exploration game. Beautiful graphics and nice AI to play against. One of my favorites. I really like the simulation games like SimCity and also some of the shooters.

Welcome to Friday!

Nice to see Fridays come here. I've been tracking a lot of the new packages in the Familiar Linux pre5 release lately and things are looking very interesting there. There is a nice new package management tool for ipkg called pikpaq I believe and the dillo web browser is looking really good. Check out handhelds.org for more details.

I ended up spending a lot of hours on a rather critical task and just when I thought I had it finished up, ended up having to stay up to recompile X from CVS sources. Painful and long compile.

There have been a lot of interesting stories on slashdot lately. I usually read /. only about once a week and I found myself checking it out quite a bit more frequently with some of the recent stories there.

I have not been able to do one thing I wanted. I really wanted to start playing a lot of the Loki games i have loaded on one of my systems and I just did not have the time. Anyways, also wanted to say "hello" to ianmacd. Hope things are going well for you!

Somewhat of an update; but could not resist. Hey paci! Welcome back. Welcome to Prosa and to its guiding principles. I wish you all the very best of luck and good fortune! Perhaps catch up with some of the folks on OPN sometime. I see a few there on occasion.

Interesting day today at work. Spent the day working on a variety of pieces of hardware and getting Linux to run on them. A few of them are very cool but news of it has to wait.

At a personal level, I have been hacking around on my IPAQ running Familiar Linux prelease 5 and its looking a bit better even though at times it has some issues. Now the dual sleeve works so I can mount a bunch of mp3s on a microdrive and be networked at the same time. One small buglet is that it does not do suspend right yet. I upgraded the ROM in my IPAQ to 32mb and the RAM is at 64mb. Interesting that CE can see the additional 16 but cannot use it. Not even under PocketPC 2002 when it comes out. Linux sees it and I can write to it immediately. Its interesting that the dual sleeve works now and when things stabilize a bit I can get intimate linux installed on the microdrive.

Have not posted a diary entry for awhile due to world events and interesting times at work. Events at both locales happen so quickly that I feel unable to keep up.

Work

Well, work was really fun today! Thanks hacker for the help! Also got to continue playing with a bunch of new hardware which is pretty cool but cannot speak of it quite yet.

Play

Play is good also! One needs play. One also needs to drink good beer which often makes play that much better. It appears that the fine folks at handhelds.org will be releasing Familiar 0.5 quite soon and it includes support for dual pcmcia sleeves for the IPAQ and a new kernel. Too cool! I really enjoy playing with Linux running on the IPAQ. dsifry, check out the wiki at handhelds.org for some additional details and more info like what we were talking about.

Other stuff

I've read a lot of the articles and diary entires about "the event". Suffice to say, I have a different take on things; but not one I will bore anyone with. After a few years in the active duty military, I perhaps see things in a different light. I mourn though with the families and friends and country that has lost so many good people to a group that leaves me in a state of pretty much total disgust. As one little snippet in the bible says, "he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind". 'Nough said.

A brand new day

Riding BART to San Francisco was rather nice. Seeing the skyline, feeling the cool breeze. There is a day after yesterday. Back to work now on some new stuff awaiting me. Sometimes I define work and other times, to my pleasure and delight, work defines me, consumes me, allows me to get forgotten in hardware and Linux distributions.

Its a time to re-energize, top off the tanks, get involved in yet more interesting projects.

Hellos first!

Hi dsifry and paci! Nice to see you both. Paci, the information you posted not so long ago about Prosa sounds very exciting and challenging! Congrats! dsifry, way to go!

Some very interesting turns of events lately at work; but time always will tell these things, so no speculation from me. Worked for awhile today on getting pretty new video cards like the ATI M6 working. Challenging and fun. It can be done, just takes a bit of work.

I also have been working a bit on some new documentation efforts for our LBT project that we gave away at the LWE. I have some plans to change my little participation a bit to allow better use of the companion tool part of things.

Finally, Intimate on the IPAQ could be said to Rock! I installed this evening on a compaq IPAQ and started using apt-get to get new packages. I could see that the disk (even a 1g microdrive) could fill up rather quick. What with doom and stuff :) dsifry, you must give this a try!