Older blog entries for nelsonrn (starting at number 5)

Sometimes I feel like I'm never getting ahead with the money. First we bought another 143 acres, then we paid our taxes (both cost about the same). Now it's a new car (Subaru Outback), and taxes again!

If I could ever get ahead, just for a few months, I could do *everything* I've been dreaming about doing. Write the qmail book. Write a CORBA interface to qmail. Write a ui to the CORBA interface.

There's a bazillion thing I want to do. I've just gotta quit fooling around and become wealthy, so I can do the things Russ wants to do, not the things my customers want me to do.

Beautiful day rowing (I row crew in a four-oar boat). Did some exercises: pause and hold, cut the cake, and double pause. Almost no wind and moderate temperatures. Hard to beat a day like this one, except that the heel strap on the stretcher for my seat had a loose screw. Said screw put a hole in my heel which hurts like hell now.

Got the Canon BJC-250 printer going on my wife's redhat box. Searched and searched through linuxconf looking for the printer configurator. Oops -- it's in printtool, not linuxconf. Or maybe it is in linuxconf, but I couldn't find it, so it may as well not be there.

Installed Word Perfect because she had been using WP6 for Windows previously. WP was no help -- it didn't have a BJC-250 driver. I had to install ghostscript's bj600 driver using printtool, and configure WP to print postscript.

Thank God for postscript, and ghostscript! Unix printing would be a nightmare without them.

A Turkish customer who unilaterally gave themselves a 10% discount on my bill after the work was done wants me back. Ha! That's too bad, really, because I got to like Turkey. But I can't work for customers I don't trust.

Might actually get back to working on the qmail book one of these days.

Well, I got past the authentication hurdle. Part of the problem of trying to mix two different types of authentication. Java wants to set a cookie, but sqwebmail wants to use a long URL with login information. So I hacked in a special type of cookie-based login for sqwebmail.

Also, sqwebmail currently writes out a lot of its own HTML. Too much HTML. So I'm changing it so its substitutions have parameters. The parameters will be HTML tags. You'll still be able to edit the raw HTML using an HTML editor, although some things might look funny.

Work, work, work, work. Back to work.

No time to write a diary entry. Deadline today on the education.com email system. And authentication still isn't working!

Hacked, replied to email, read slashdot. Just like every other day.

Signed up for an advogato account. Ranted (again) about how badly the autoconf/automake toolchain sucks, and how miserable it makes developers who don't use it every day.