Older blog entries for realblades (starting at number 45)

Got a new pet -- an Octane. Happy me.

Rewrote my Irix tardist building environment to use make. It doesn't seem to help too much. I should experiment a lot more, maybe publish something (if only sf wasn't so bad) and look at all the other make building systems like pkgsrc.

Toyed a bit with ocaml.

Someone got me looking at GStreamer. It seems very nice apart from linux-centrism in the docs and pages and some weird windos-envy. Then there's the state of the documentation and thread problems.. Still, looks like a great framework.

16 Nov 2003 (updated 16 Nov 2003 at 15:19 UTC) »

Some very nice and linkful web pages, especially Wiki's, can lead to me doing something like a very long depth-first search. When I hit the bottom of a branch, I should backtrack. The back button does something and maybe I even remember where I was in the previous page.

Sometimes instead of that I keep opening all interesting links in new windows (Dillo) or tabs (Galeon) and then browsing them. I try to go layer by layer, but sometimes I go back to depth first.

So I started wondering if it would be nice to have some functionality in a browser to help in this. First idea was to add an item to a link's contect menu that pushes it to a stack of "read this" pages (unless it's already there?) and I can then walk that stack when I have time. Well, it should be a bit more complex than that, but just accumulating bookmarks or windows/tabs is quite tedious.

Clearly that would require some more thought and time to try stuff like bookmarklets or hacking dillo to test approaches.

Besides diving into C2 again, I noticed one WikiClone doing a form of FacetedClassification. That spawned more ideas. Must try to write more stuff down outside my LogBooks.

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.

8 Jul 2003 (updated 8 Jul 2003 at 10:07 UTC) »

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.

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