Older blog entries for richieb (starting at number 30)

This past weekend I installed Debian 2.2 on my desktop machine. This time I was pretty careful not to mess up Windows. This machine has a whole bunch of stuff in it: three HDs, CD burner, network card, sound and modem.

The installation went pretty smoothly. At first I was afraid to mess up the MBR so I set up LILO on a floppy. I had saved all the configuration info from RH so I was able to reuse lilo.conf (except that I made one mistake and I wiped out the System.map file in the /boot partition). This file is only used to debug the kernel, but occasionally I get errors that this file is in the wrong format. I'll have to find another copy of it, or else I'll have to try and recompile the kernel to create it.

The next challenge was to get the network working. Although everything was configured properly, I wasn't able to ping my other machine. I saw the lights blink, but the ARP tables remained empty.

After poking around for a while, I just decided to take the isapnp.conf I had set up under RH and put it in /etc. Once I did that and I restarted pnp stuff the network came up. Wahoo!

So now I can start and set up dialup and few other things.

I'm trying to use Gnome with WindowMaker and I need to find a nice compromise for the look. It's a bit ugly right now. I used WindowMaker before RH came with the Gnome/E combination. I prefer the look of WindowMaker it's classier.

The cool thing about Debian is that you get to learn a lot more of what goes on in the system (like this ARP stuff that I completely forgot about).

Tomorrow I'll work on the modem and the sound...

I decided to move all my Linux computers to the Debian distribution. Until now I used Red Hat on my machines, although I had installed Debian on an old Toshiba laptop and on several Sparc 5s.

I started today by trying out the installation on some old Pentium machines I have lying around. I use those for fiddling with network configurations an so on.

The install worked wit little problems. The only glich I had was that I forgot to specifically configure the ethernet board the first time through, so no network was configured.

But once I got past that error, things went on smoothly. Next I'm going to redo my desktop machine - I'll remove RH 6.2 and install Debian. Once I get everything running there I'll update my laptop. Since my Sony laptop has become my main computer, I need to make sure that everything will work before I make the move.

The big snow came. We got over a foot of snow. I got to shovel our driveway several times :-). I took my daughter sledding in the afternoon. We had a great time - the snow was feathery and it was a pleasure to roll in it. Now it's seven o'clock in the evening and I'm a bit exhausted from all this physical activity!

I tried a new bread recipe and made two loafs today. They came really great and we ate nearly all the bread in 15 minutes. It's recipe that take a while to complete, as at various points the dough has to "rest" for several hours, but this was one of the best loafs I've ever made.

While making the bread, I also made and MP3 CD of all my Led Zeppelin CDs. Six CDs took little more than half of a data CD.

Well, there is a big snow storm heading for the east coast, so it's likely that we will be stuck home for few days. This is fine with me, I need little down time.

For Xmas I got a Philips CD/MP3 player. It plays normal CDs or it can play MP3 files from a data CD. It's pretty cool. I'm playing with burning CDs with various batches of music. For example, I can get most of my Led Zeppelin CDs onto one MP3 CD.

Another present I got was a cookbook on making bread. I like to bake bread occasionally. It's sort of an excercise in chemistry and chaotic mathematics (all that kneeding :-)). So I tried something new and made pizza last Monday. It came pretty good. I love freshly baked bread (mine isn't that good yet).

Besides that I got a new book by Martin Davis called "The Universal Computer". It's a popular book on computability theory. Martin Davis was my teacher in graduate school and he is a rather famous mathematician. Among other things he contributed to the solution of one of the famous Hilbert's problems (was it the tenth or eleventh one).

I keep a list of books I'm reading on the web in another spot. If you like to see it take a look here: Richie's reading list

More tomorrow on the snow storm...

I'm still pretty busy at work. We're are struggling with figuring out what exactly our applications is going to do. So we spend hours with bussiness guys to try and understand the details, then code for a day or two and then go back to talking.

It's interesting to see the company grow. When I started in May there were 5 people in the office, now there are twenty five. The development/tech team has grown from two to ten.

I'm learning all kinds of cool stuff, but unfortunately this eats a lot of time, so I don't have much time left over for open source coding....sigh.

I haven't posted much to this diary, mostly because I have started a new job this summer and I'm rather busy at work. Things don't look like they will let up until early next year - if that soon. I'm involved in building a large Java/Internet application from scratch...

I'm judge in the yearly Eiffel Struggle, so I'll get to play with some neat Eiffel applications...

Nothing much has been happening on the programming at home front. I'm sort of busy at work. I did set up the eWiki server as a project on Sourceforge and I started a home page for the project: http://ewiki.sourceforge.net.

I created a web page with some pictures from the Eiffel Coding Fest.

This weekend it rained most of the time. Today we went to visit one of my music playing friends. We got to play some music in his basement.

Last week I spent at the TOOLS USA conference in Santa Barbara. TOOLS is a small conference (about 200 or so attendees) that tends on the technical side, rather than marketing and hype.

Here is a quickie summary of events I attended: workshop on computer science education, tutorial on Java/DB programming, Eiffel Summit, Eiffel Design and Coding Fest, and refactoring tutorial. I saw all the keynotes by people like Bertrand Meyer, Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler.

I gave a short talk and a demo at Eiffel Summit showing eGTK and glade/eglade. I was the leader of the Extreme Eiffel Design and Coding Fest. This turned out to be a great event. See this report for more details.

The other really neat side of TOOLS is hanging out in the evening with some very smart people arguing about all sorts of things...

I'm writing this from the exhibition room at the TOOLS USA conference in Santa Barbara. Today at Eiffel Summit I gave a short talk about eGTK. I also saw a Mico/E demo that used eGTK. That was pretty cool.

Right now I'm drinking some wine and I'm getting ready to go to dinner.