Older blog entries for realblades (starting at number 58)

Installed plan9 recently. It really has loads of wonderful ideas that I sorely miss in other systems. Still, it doesn't fill enough of my needs to do much anything with. At least there's still quite a bit to learn there and it looks interesting.

The strange Guile/mailutils bug persists. Sent report to Debian.

Oddly enough my OpenBSD/sparc firewall also threw a panic the other day. Didn't find the energy to report that. Just noted that the console was showing a debugger when I turned the terminal on. After reboot, it has been running fine.

First time I had to do percussive maintenance. My unused hppa workstation hard drive made weird sounds. Eventually I decided that the disk wasn't turning and the odd sounds came from the drive head and/or some kind of recovery procedure. Hammer→bearing and all seems well again. It's not an important disk and merely holds an experimenting system, so I'm not too worried about its state. Also came across Tor.

More scheme code at work and home. Much fun. Except that I got Guile to segfault using mailutils libraries. Seems that if I explicitly close a mailbox, the interpreter eventually segfaults. In a thread. From gc. With no debug symbols. I figured out how to build a -dbg deb and traced a bit more and then just removed the closes and so far the thing works. It should be no problem if I don't close the boxes while running a batch job. I'm almost itching to try something with the bigloo object system and C bindings and perhaps libdbi.

Back from a week of low-tech work/holiday. I keep feeling more and more that I should finally start making a picture organizer after my own taste. I seem to be behind some kind of threshold that I should get past in order to start hacking anything. Instead I'm reading, practising for Bujinkan and watching the snow pile up and temperature creep down outside.

GT4 release date here is only a few weeks away, I believe. Would be nice to finally get that. I hope the non-driving related components have improved as they were really irritating in an otherwise great simulation.

Firefox still doesn't accept mozex. At least some other extensions and features work and help remove some of the netrape braindeadness. Every time I hit ^U to erase a text field I get homicidal. Otherwise the new release looks acceptable.

Phew. I finally moved to Oulu again and now I even have the computing gear running once again. There has been qiute a bit of reorganization and I sold what I could get some money out of (including my dear Octane and a NeXT cube and a few RS6k's).

New fileserver, working firewall on OpenBSD/sparc (pf is so nice!) and main workstation is finally running Debian, not RHL (Ion2! Language bindings! CUPS! Xsane! potrace!

Seems they won't support my studying here, so I'll just have to work.

Learned to make Debian packages (again) and keep a local apt repo for my employer. Packaged some in-house software and went through bugfix dance with them etc. Great fun, really. Apt and all the helpers are so nice. I have built rpms and handled an apt repository there, but that is much more work.

I considered starting to package recluse for Debian.

Did quite a bit of Wiki edits again. I'm looking for a place to start on a Hardware wiki idea.

Learned a bit of Ruby and wrote some small programs needed at work. It's really a brilliant tool. It's a shame that kind of handiness is rarely found in languages I like more.

I'm still considering rewriting munin-node in it just to avoid perl and the cpan modules that are hell to port.

Oh, and I rescued a NeXT cube.

Saw a link to dsps in a (the?) Wiki. Seems that my condition is documented or at least the signs match. I just simply don't fall asleep before around 04:00, except if I try to nap during the day. That makes a gap in something like 18:00 - 04:00 with little hope of going to sleep. It's weird and plays merry hell with trying to keep in sync with the world (world like SO, public transport, lectures etc). *sigh*

Hm. I guess the doctor for the army did more than a good move in releasing me from peacetime service hearing I'm an insomniac of some sort. (It probably wasn't about the psychological tests. *cough*)

The more Haskell I learn, the more I like it.

Disney buys Muppets. Such a loss.

Another weird idea about intrusion detection crossed my mind.