Older blog entries for realblades (starting at number 36)

Spent a nice few weeks north again. It's nice to get out to a place where you can walk out the door and be completely alone. No-one needs you at work and no-one keeps pestering you with something else. Sitting on a log in the sun and watching the snow and ice melt from the lake is a wonderful way to improve one's perspective.

Returning "home", I pick up pretty much where I left; get new tasks from work and see when the exam days are.

10 Apr 2003 (updated 10 Apr 2003 at 11:36 UTC) »

*sigh* It's the 12th century pope and Hitler put together. Seems there is a part of the world that hasn't gotten over either. And most of the world are playing the same game again, giving lebenraum for the American Way Of Life. It's unbelievable.

I've been studying some linear algebra and doing random little things.

A raid controller went nuts some days ago and it seems that server is not reviveable. At least the hiccupping tape drive turned out to be ok and the extra disk pair in another raid array works fine.

I'm tempted to buy the guts of an R3k Indigo nearby, but I really don't have much use for them. I'm still very happy I got the Indigo², though. A wonderful machine.

The second-to-last PC in the house also went down for a while. Something doesn't quite work right with JFS and NFS. It did make it past 200 days, though. I should finally take on the project of replacing it with an Alpha board. Having to have a keyboard attached, a VIA chipset, a BIOS that doesn't recognize the 80G drives, a SCSI controller that doesn't play well with grub and having to boot from a floppy to get past those.. *sigh*

After a bit of promising spring weather and even dry sidewalks, it started snowing again.

A co-worker asked me if I knew any Lisp and how could he get a set of Java sources to be indented automatically. In the programming team a few users' Emacsen indent differently and that really messes diffs. I said it should be easy, just make a list and go through it running open, indent and close on each file and that I'd just need a glance at the reference. I swiftly proceeded to write him a function that did the visit-indent-kill cycle and was interrupted before I made another that would pick the files from a directory. Instead I gave him an awk one-liner that would generate the neccessary script. It worked. Emacs is hideous if editing anything, but the elisp interpreter is really handy and the manual is rather good.

So we started to wonder about the root of the problem. It appears emacs20 and emacs21 indent some things differently. We upgraded everyone to 21 and ran the indents as a batch job.

Still didn't get the IBM 7012 320 to boot. I have the serial port pinout but no cable. I haven't tried kludging it with wire yet.

I did shut down the 7006. Phew! I could make a third cat out of all that dust. I took out the framebuffer in it that I had added a vga-style connector to. Didn't get a signal out of that either with 7012 in diagnostics, though.

I took apart the 8mm IBM DAT and after nudging some things back and forth and extracting the stuck tape, it started working again. Ejecting and taking tapes and obeying scsi eject. No data in or out and no mt commands work in Irix, though. The 7210-001 CD neither. And 7012 doesn't boot off an Aix CD in another known to work drive. Oh, well. At least I did some spring cleaning shuffling all that stuff around.

I should count my serial ports and see that every machine has a console. Or buy a terminal server.

27 Mar 2003 (updated 27 Mar 2003 at 13:35 UTC) »

I have been messing more with Debian on hppa. Sent a few bug reports on strange behaviour in some packages.

Started playing Urban Terror again. I wish Id would not have tried to kludge together a little command language that they have to try to extend and users have to try to get around and test tediously. They should just have put in a nice small interpreter for an existing language and document the new functions that are available. Well, at least my keybindings work now that I overwrite the config file with my own in the startup script.

Converted more bookmarks to awkiawki

Tried to kick myself into writing more Java for the course with litle success.

The Postfix RPM project apt repository seems to be finally up. Also, v2 doesn't seem to have virtual_maps in postconf because they were renamed. This happens to break webmin. Google found a brief discussion on the webmin list.

Hmm.. I wonder if there is a way to run programs with Latin as a locale language. That would finally make locales useful. I have run in fi and se locales sometimes just for fun and use google in latin only. Oh! Swedish chef locales! ISAGN! :)

Started looking through some of my CDs of archived stuff. It's a shame so many of thee nice old SCSI CD drives are not "multiread compatible".

I have been idly converting my bookmarks to awkiawki and throwing in some snippets of text as well. I made some entries to others, including the excellent Wikipedia

Discovered and installed MoinMoin. That might turn out to be useful at work.

For myself, I installed awkiawki which is a funny little wiki clone written in, yes, AWK!

Managed to install Debian on my HP 715/80 finally. The trick was to not select a keyboard layout. I've then discovered debfoster, which is just what I needed and sent several bug reports about little dependency flaws and some no-go's.

My birthday is getting closer.

I curse loudly towards ORBit and GConf because they don't just work and mostly seem to be bad reinventions of the wheel and usually not optional. Maybe it will get better, it probably won't go away.

I wonder if thereis a way to track diary entries apart from the recent page? I don't read it so often and I think I'm missing a lot. I doubt anyone actually puts anything referring to me there, but if they do, I'd like to know. Similiarly about article comments. Can I see where my account is mentioned?

I don't see functionality like this mentioned anywhere obvious.

I've been reading and reading and reading, as usual. Common LISP, LaTeX and Ada mostly these days, besides Thief Of Time and some Lovecraft.

I ran out of pages in my old notebook of a sort and had a weird idea to make a (la)tex template that I could print and get a title page and a set of numbered pages.

The process was simple. I made the document, looked at a few fonts, wrote my logo in raw postscript to include on the title page, made a Makefile and compiled and recompiled and then ran through psbook | psnup | psselects to get odd and even sides and numberings to run right. Peachy.

Only it seems impossible to do an A5 size document and then lay it on the pages. Making A4 is easy enough, but everything ends up 50% of the intended size once you print. That sucks. Setting the document type just gets me an a4 ps with an a5 page at the middle. Seems pdflatex gets it right, IIRC.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll fiind a way or go bother someone or try another dvips or pdf2ps or such.

Back to work.

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