Older blog entries for neale (starting at number 9)

15 Mar 2001 (updated 15 Mar 2001 at 18:55 UTC) »

Last night we discovered that I'd left the car door open when we parked the car. I parked the car on Sunday, four days earlier. So I pushed the car back and forth on the 30 feet of flat pavement we had in the parking garage while Amy tried to pop the clutch and get it running. Unfortunately, I'd decided to park at the very bottom, so it was a uphill on one end, and a wall on the other. Finally, a dude in a jeep showed up and gave me a jump start. Today I'm sore.

After pushing the car around for a while, we went back to UW. I went to Bill's room and checked out this system he's got rigged up to measure gas flow with some kind of Data Acquisition board he's got hooked up to the parallel port of an old laptop. They're doing it in DOS, and I talked to the guy writing the code about writing an interrupt handler for the timer interrupt to do hard realtime sampling of this port (you have to poll it, which makes me wonder why they didn't just go straight into the parallel port). It brought back fond memories of writing 8086 assembly code when I explaied to the dude what AH and AL were, and how they were the same as AX. He was a junior CS student and didn't know what a union was. C++ is evil.

A guy on thunk was bugging me to add "last article posted on..." text to the article overview functionailty of mod_virgule, so I did, and sent the diff in to raph. Does that mean I get to register myself as a Helper on mod_virgule? There's no option for "know the code fairly well, sent in a diff, feel free to ask me questions" :-)

When she requested last week I put Linux on her computer, I asked Amy if she felt like she knew it well enough to use it as her primary OS. Her response was, "what exactly is it I'm supposed to learn how to do?" I think that speaks well of where things have come. I guess most people need an email client, web browser, mp3 player, and word processor, in that order. KDE gives her all of that in a nice package.

Waldo: don't just drop your idea, dude, it's cool. I already volunteered my company, I'm sure other people are excited. Flesh it out and start a project on sourceforge. We don't care if you don't know how to do it technically, just be glue and provide architectural oversight.

sye, it's been my experience that there is enough room on the Internet for people to go off and form as many splinter groups as they like. Witness how kuro5hin and advogato have been sort of "splits" off of slashdot. So if you're unhappy with something, nobody's preventing you from starting your own version of it. However, as I have found over the years, unless there's a need for something, your new endeavor won't attract much attention.

This is the problem I keep having; with the exception of a successful IRC channel that I joint-formed with two or three other people, my luck with forming splinter groups has been abysmal. Unless you're just dripping with charisma, you're better off waiting until there's a sense of need among a community. And it doesn't look like skolos really has much going on with it, so I'm afraid your options are to play by their rules or just give up.

Giving up isn't so bad. Socratic dialog is getting far less play these days than it deserves. And there is a lot of neat stuff to do in the world, especially now that days are getting longer up here in the northern hemisphere.

sye and I have been having an OOB discussion on thunk about this skolos site. I'm not quite sure what to make of skolos, but it appears to have lost momentum in the same way that thunk has, and I don't know that I have the magic touch to revive it.

Amy got sick last night, so I spent some time nurturing. We're both itchin' to put Linux on her computer, maybe this weekend. I want to see the anti-aliased font rendering in the new Qt library.

At work, I'm actually beginning to get up to speed again. It's amazing how frustrated and depressed I get if I don't have anything to do. I work so well under pressure that when there isn't any pressure, I grind to a halt.

The lighting situation today isn't bothering me much. It's cloudy outside. I'm supposed to move to a window cube (a viewbicle) but I want to push some code out before I make the move. It just doesn't feel right getting the window seat without at least attempting to earn the respect of my peers.

Something interesting I wrote on the 19th of January:

Gnome, I have just this moment decided, is pretty, but not much else. The only graphical thing that I've really taken on in the past ten years has been the web browser. Right now I have seven xterms and one xemacs visible, and a Mozilla and a Galeon minimized. I just closed out gmc because I wanted to try Nautilus, which wouldn't launch because it couldn't find the right libraries, and I realized that I never use gmc anyway, except to install things on my palm pilot. But I think Amy will like it whenever they get the package fixed. I've been reading a lot about how the text interface is to the GUI what books are to television. After reading a bunch of Asimov stories, I wonder if there won't come a day where knowing how to read and write isn't required for day-to-day activities, and most people won't know how to do it.

My mod_virgule thingy is seeming sort of directionless. Which was expected. I remember, at IPC-7, ESR talking about his new paper, "Homesteading the Noosphere", and someone likening it to bachelor predators attempting to find mating grounds. I think that's what I've been doing for the last umpteen years, at least WRT computers.

In trying to figure out what made Advogato successful, I stumbled across a very old article with advice to young free software hackers (that's me). Good stuff, far better than ESR's "How to be a hacker" IMHO. I got a lot out of Havoc Pennington's guide too. I think I haven't spent enough time learning about things, which is why I'm having the kinds of leadership problems I've been having. There is no dark side of the force I can just instantly switch to here, I gotta stack a lot of rocks first.

Thanks for writing those things, guys.

PHPix2 seems to be picking up; after going through and fiddling with bug reports, one of my developers has arisen from the dead, and we've got someone volunteering to port to NT. cdh sent in some good suggestions for Solaris and just getting the feedback was a good morale boost, so that project may be heading somewhere again. I'm thinking about releasing every two weeks instead of every month. One of the more interesting problems is that I started the project because I'd made really significant changes to the original PHPix, but the author appeared to be comatose, so I started up PHPix2 on sourceforge and did all my work there. Then the author resurfaced and seemed a bit miffed; after a few friendly exchanges he's dropped off the map again, so I don't know what to do about this. The only other developer on the project seems to think we should merge the stuff back in and then make a clean break, rewriting the thing from scratch. I can't really convince myself that it's worth all that trouble for a silly photo album program, but then again I don't want to steal anyone's thunder. Oh, what to do, what to do.

Last night I set up mod_virgule on my vanity domain, and some of my friends started messing around with it. I have this long history of finding really great technological hammers, and not having any nails to hit. This is probably another such case. Maybe I can use it for my homepage though, the diary idea intrigues me. As it is right now, it seems to be forming a small kind of community.

Speaking of that, sye's diary makes for some really interesting reading, especially to those of us who are more interested in the social aspects of this place than the technological feats occurring as a result. (Did I just give a shout out to sye? Gawd.)

As I was walking home last night, I wondered why I wrote what I did about "Advogato Karma," even as a joke. That kind of thinking sucks (profound statement for the day).

It's hard to work on PHPix2 when Amy wants to play every night when I get home. It's a funny thing about PHPix2 though, I took over from a guy who was updating it about once every six months (he didn't seem very pleased about it when he finally got back to me). I get to it about once a month, and the people who initially showed interest in it have all pretty much fallen off the map. Maybe that means it's a good tool, something you set up and then forget about. But it's not going to get me any Advogato karma, darnit!

Amy's Windows box keeps crashing on her. Out of nowhere last week she asked me to install Linux on it, so I gave her a VNC viewer and set up KDE on the server. She seems to like it. I wasn't too impressed with KDE, but I couldn't put my finger on why. The way the palm pilot thing worked may have had something to do with it; it shares information with other apps using files, ick. And it didn't do it well, either, I corrupted my address book by hotsyncing. Konqueror was really nice, though.

The lighting here at work is abysmal. Everyone likes it dark, which I can understand, but because of how my cube is situatied, I have to use the backlight on my palm pilot just to read it. I keep falling asleep and I'm not too satisfied with my performance or ability to carry out complex thoughts. I hate to blame my entire state of mind on living in a cave from 8 to 5, but it sounds like this may be plausible. Has anyone else had problems with too little light?

I've decided on a language: O'Caml. In learning it, I realized that I really didn't know Scheme as well as I thought I did. Caml is not a language a guy like me learns in a day.

Last night after talking it over with my lady friend, I resolved to go get my PhD in Computer Science. Reading the ML book I found somewhere or other, I realized that I love solving math problems, and that writing proxy code in C is not what I want to be doing in ten years. Before, I was afraid that getting a PhD would limit my job opportunities to nothing but research positions. After having worked in Industry for the last five years, I am positively thrilled about not having any opportunities other than research positions.

I am, of course, understating all of the work it takes to get a PhD.

I finally got the ip_queue module working. I feel like if I had actually been focused, I could have figured out the problem much more quickly. It just entailed reading the man page. The problem was lack of focus and not realizing that kernel modules would be documented in a man page for userspace libraries. Maybe I should write a HOWTO.

20 Feb 2001 (updated 20 Feb 2001 at 23:54 UTC) »
Waldo: I think the solution to many of your girlfriend's woes lies in Unix groups. I've never used Red Hat for very long but I believe it has a fairly sane policy for installing things with sane group ownerships. Go through /etc/groups and add her in to whatever seems relevant (she'll have to log out and log back in when you're done).

You can also make devices mountable by users if you set the "user" flag in /etc/fstab. Check it out (man mount for more info):

/dev/sda4 /zip vfat defaults,rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,noauto,user,async 0 0

Yeah. My girlfriend just emailed me saying her computer has locked up for the fourth time in an hour. It may have been the Quicktime or RealAudio players we recently installed. It seems as though the fragility of Windows hasn't improved much since 3.1, when I quit using it. I have a feeling this is because of the crufty way that device drivers get loaded. I'm sure the idea for corewars wasn't entirely original...

20 Feb 2001 (updated 20 Feb 2001 at 21:29 UTC) »

I'm green now. More accurately, my name now has a green background, which means that I can follow up to stuff here. Having played around with this website a bit, it seems as though the real activity on Advogato is the diaries. I got certified by Telsa, someone with a lot of certifications. So I looked into it some more and discovered that, among other things, she's been playing NetHack ever since NetHack was cool. Somehow I feel as though I may be entering into the realm of the Ritchies and Knuths of my time.

Back before the web, there used to be people (most of them at UCB) who would post a diary entry every day or so, in their .plan. You could finger them and read their most recent entries. Some of them were pretty interesting. There is nothing new under the sun; that's exactly what's going on here. There's no threading, or any other sort of coherency between people's diary entires; only the implicit assumption that people are going to be reading each others' stuff and conversing within their entries.

I spent the day trying alternately to install virgule, and get NetFilter working. Not a very productive day: at noon I realized that I was still using the 2.2 modutils. Sometimes the ease of having a nice installer lulls one into stupidity, I suppose. Virgule doesn't want to install, it appears to need two different versions of libxml at the same time, and even after compiling and linking, it tries to send me a content-type of application/unix-directory. unix-directory appears nowhere in the apache binary or the compiled virgule module, so I give up (which is what I would have done anyway, after a few weeks of play).

After flirting briefly with the idea of using Scheme as a transport filter language for our proxy engine, I am now leaning back toward Java. If I can get GCJ away from its dependency on that monstrous 1MB "libgcjc" library, maybe I can use it. Otherwise, it looks like C. And I really abhor the thought of doing yet another large project where I have to waste my time messing around with memory allocation.

19 Feb 2001 (updated 19 Feb 2001 at 23:35 UTC) »

Hello, world.

So I got an Advogato account because I saw an interesting article by Waldo, finally something for which I had an interesting contribution. And then I found out that I can't, I have to win some sort of popularity contest before I can post here.

Not that this is a bad thing. I have a feeling that the rules on Advogado merely codify unwritten social practices prevalent in many primate societies. I know that gorillas at least work this way. You have to schmooze with your peers before you get anyone's attention, in much the same way that politicians have to befriend a lot of people at cocktail parties. This place has an incredibly high signal:noise ratio, which is the main reason I read it. And I found the author's email address, so all is not lost.

In any case, it appears as though getting certified requires a lot of these journal entries. After a while you will somehow accumulate popularity points as others bestow their blessings upon you, so here I am, writing. I am reminded of BBS software I briefly looked at before I wrote ][ntercom, which used what the authors proported to be an AI algorithm to rate postings on message boards. If you got high ratings, you could do special tricks. I believe it used terms like "Apprentice", "Wizard", and "Sorcerer". The name of the software escapes me.

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