Older blog entries for realblades (starting at number 43)

Did a small scheme eval window type thing in FLTK to learn that and get some exercise. Great fun.

Quite a bit of downtime on the Elisa DSL once again. Nothing big, though.

Installed debian on a pair of Sun LX50 boxes and set up RAID1 in the process. Twice. The first try ended up totally dead and the second try sometimes hiccups at boot. There must be something I managed to mess up or something funny with the kernel that makes it sometimes refuse to start raid pairs.

Pretty nice machines all in all. SMP, serial redirected everything, very fast SCSI buses and quite nice construction in 1U. Heavy price tag though.

http://people.debian.org/~blade/install/ was a nice find.

A bona fide lucid dream entered from a repeated scene recognised as a dreamsign plus a false awakening! Finally I managed it. It's amazing how very few things surprise you when you're asleep.

And back to earth, this companion in life of mine has showed her scheming side (and I don't mean the language) again.

It's getting really hot in here. Better get back to reading Cryptonomicon outside.

Mr Herbert handed me a package of Dillo for Irix. Man, that thing *flies*. Shame about the messy macros that bother compiling it with mipspro, though.

Kolumbus/Elisa has surprisingly been giving me an internet connection without interruptions for a few days. Whee! :)

I've gotten more Mac stuff assigned to me the weird platform person and I'm getting more and more iffed looking at Apple. Systemwise OS X is missing everything that would be half-useful and the sites and docs are horrible and nothing seems to work in a sane way. And I don't mean differences, I know the system and I knew NeXT as well.

I got around to looking at FLTK again. There's many little crude bits and of course it doesn't use the system toolkits which has a few downsides (like no Indigo Magic), but it looks very interesting. There is some IM look in the clock and file requester, though. Which of course is nice.

Saw King Crimson live last sunday. Absolutely unbelievable. Only the applause was deafening. They returned to stage three times IIRC and finally Adrian said they couldn't go on anymore. Seeing YUP saturday was nice as well.

More playing with db4 and C++. I made a little mk/ch/rm/ls setup that allows managing a .. list :)

Nice summer weather outside. Things are pretty nice all around. Doing more and more planning and writing and reading. Finally finished the Lovecraft and continued the Wittgenstein. I should go take a walk around and photograph some stuff.

Work goes on as usual as well.

Another weird idea crossed my mind just the other day about making a floorboard for a computer that would have a set of pedals that would have some programmable remote-control effects. That would be neat if I have my hands full with something (like a guitar) and want to scroll what I was reading or adjust something. Doesn't seem very likely that I'll try to make one, though.

I kind of regret selling my MIDI gear. Would be fun trying to torture it now that I'm armed with more hardware and API's.

Toyed a bit with db(4) C++ interface after messing with flat file databases.

Turns out I lost my OpenGL and Scheme toys in the fs crash a while ago. Oh, well. Nothing important there anyway.

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" -- Linus Torvalds

Bought a new guitar (Steinberger) a while ago. I guess that's news too. Source of much recovery.

Life and work as usual. Reading a lot more about electronics and medieval history and culture.

Apparently because of a volume manager error the shared home directories in my personal system got lost.

Will have to fix the actual problem by redoing the whole scheme and keeping the rest of the volumes and then dropping back stuff from backups which are naturally old. Backups by their very nature are. *sigh* I hate this.

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.

*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.