Older blog entries for mrcsparker (starting at number 83)

26 Mar 2004 (updated 26 Mar 2004 at 20:41 UTC) »

Been writing my shell scripts in C. Not sure if they are shell scripts, but they do the same thing as a normal shell script would do. Anyone else do this?

I was writing them in PHP, Perl, or Bash, but I write pretty much the same app in C in the same time. Plus, I don't have to have a manual open in front of me ("How do I do this in BASH... google for it... hmmm") so that I am doing it the "correct" way. I would make a crappy sysadmin.

By the way Muine really rocks hard.

Yeah! Java is not going to be free software

Smart move, Sun. No ANSI, no ISO, and now no code. Sure, but you have to JCP, which is almost like a standard - if you look at it sideways and you have no clue what makes a real standard. Dum dum dum dum dum.

Gnome 2.8 Roadmap

Yea. Just read that all of the GUI stuff in GNOME is moving out of GNOME libs and into GTK. Smart move. So no more libgnomeui?

Downtown Houston: 700+ people are getting visas a day to work in Iraq for Haliburton. There are lines going around the block with people waiting so that they can go over. No matter what you feel about this, it is still odd that this is not being considered news-worthy. I haven't seen anything about this on the news, but the lines are there.

In other news, working on focaza. Creating more of an object-like system.

I guess that sometimes forking can be good

Well, when you have no choice. The developer said that he wouldn't accept outside patches and we already had the software installed on a dozen servers. So, I emailed him begging - please, please - the administrators want me to change the program around a bit and I did not want to maintain my own patches. After a few days, a few emails later, I asked him if I could fork the project and he agreed and all is fine.

So, I am a forker.

Really, I get the best of both worlds - I get great piece of software to build on and any changes I make go back under the GPL. Really, though, I wanted to work with the developer.

So, I added the GNU build system, broke out a bunch of code into libraries. I can pretty much do what I want now, you know. Though it is written in C, I gave it a quasi-OOP system so I can just pass structs between interfaces. And I gave it on of those really annoying names that means absolutely nothing: focaza.

GNU Arch

is really fucking cool. Eveything that I ever wanted in a source control system. I don't understand why people think that CVS is easier than GNU Arch - have any of you guys/girls who think this ever tried to delete a directory in CVS, change a file name or move one large section of your code to another section. Arch makes all of this simple.

tla commit

Had some great conversations via email on Friday with a couple of Free Software developers. One project I wanted to contribute code to did not want any outside code so the guy was really cool and said he wouldn't mind if I forked the project (yea, I know - fork bad). The other guy gave me updates on what he thought was wrong with a really big Free Software project from the inside. {} Not being specific here for a reason - for the first project I do not want to announce that I am forking because the project is excellent and I do not want to cause inner conflicts (but the code will be released under a different name). On the second topic, I would hate to skew anyone's opinion and the guy who had the complaints has not voiced all of them in public yet (though I think that he will).

In other news, I read Havoc Pennington's blog about choosing OpenOffic over GNOME Office and it was a bit depressing (http://log.ometer.com - 2004-03-06: Office suites). I am not a GNOME developers myself, but I thought that with things like bonobo having to pick a specific application as an office suite would not be necessary. I know that OpenOffice is not able to embed gnumeric or AbiWord documents, but I really hope this is where GNOME Office is eventually heading. While I am at it - where does bonobo fit in to the picture? From my days as a Windows developer, I really miss being able to easily embed one application into another - or use a component from one application in another.

Forking Code and Releasing Early

Reading my email this morning I see that a project that I worked on is forking for what seems the hundredth time. I left it a few months ago waiting for the 2.6 kernel to start working on it again and it seems like about 3-4 developers have decided to start their own little 2.6 forks. You see, the problem is that the original project has not released often enough and the developers who actually need the code have gotten impatient. Myself, I have given up. The code looks like spaghetti now (with all of its #defines for 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 kernels) and it really needs some serious cleaning up.

There is also another project that I started working with where the maintainer released the code under the GPL but did not want any patches from any external developers. No patches? The project does 75% of what my company needs and it seems a waste to start a new project all by myself. The Unix administrator has started installing the project on a few machines and it works really well but has some apparent shortcomings. So, do I fork? I emailed the maintainer and he does not seem keen to respond back.

4 Feb 2004 (updated 4 Feb 2004 at 01:40 UTC) »

It seems like everything that I want working on my T40 is working - with a bit of work on my part:
ACPI - Suspend works with gentoo-dev-sources (2.6.1). There are some problems with the e1000 module when it comes back up - sometimes I lose my connection. cpufreqd is a cool program.
Sound works well with alsa and - unlike my T23 - there are no problems after I come up from suspend. Not sure if this is because I was using APM with the T23.
The wireless card works with the ndiswrapper driver (wrapper around Intel's proprietary Windows Centrino driver). I hate this, by the way. It works well, and the guys and girls who wrote the wrapper should be commended, but Intel really sucks for the Centrino driver mess - not worth going in to.
Graphics driver works well. Well enough to play cube. I am using the kernel driver, not ATI's proprietary mess.
Laptops still have quite a way when it comes to free operating systems. I am not blaming the developers - the companies that make the hardware are still so protective over their proprietary bits.

In other news, I played with LTSP a bit today for work. K12 is great. Clusterknoppix is great. I am so lucky to have all of this cool shit to play with. Though, I can't help but think with a bit of polish these projects could all come together and make a really kick-ass terminal server solution. Automatic clustering, terminal server, simple gui tools...

- Got a new IBM T40 yesterday. Very sweet.
- Might be purchasing 300+ linux boxes for work. Novell is really pushing this, and I think that it is great. I can stop doing HP-UX programming and move over to Linux. Yea.

Got up feeling really tired, not sure why. Getting hot all day - maybe it is menopause or something.

Wrote a bit of a tiny, tiny xml-rpc server for work. We need a notification system here for our thousands of servers laid out accross the US and xml-rpc seems like the best route to go for alot of what want to do. The company is going to let me GPL it so when it is done I am going to set up a mailing list and put the code somewhere for people to view.

Originally we planned on using another project we found on SourceForge but the developer was not accepting any major patches, and in order for it to work for us it would need some major changes. Oh well, the system I am putting together right now, thought the core is written in C, should allow applications written in muliple languages to communicate with eachother.

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