Computer Woos
My father bought a new hard disk for the Linux, and I picked it up on
Wedensday. After I got home, I installed it, burned the first Mandrake 9.1
CD and installed it on it. The installation went pretty well, except for
a glitch that the bootloader was installed despite the fact I did not want
it to be installed. Plus, when I booted the computer it did not work.
Knoppix came to the rescue and I restored the old bootloader and copied
the new kernel and initrd to my Windows partition. I rebooted, ran loadlin
and started the new system. It worked. I then spent some time configuring
it to my liking and restoring my data from a backup CD I made of the
hard-disk.
I installed XFS there, and the hard-disk has an 8 MB cache, so everything
felt very smooth. However, yesterday when I turned on my computer, it started
burning inside, and would not boot. My father took it to repair and at
midday he called me to inform that there was a short-circuit in the video
card, and that the CPU, the motherboard and the video card are ruined. We'll
have to buy a new computer. (which is a shame because the old computer worked
very well until now).
So now I'm working on the WinXP laptop, and eagerly wait for the arrival of the
new computer.
Biking
My bike's front wheel is not working now, the problem being probably with
the brakes. I'll have to take it to repair after the weekend.
Version Control Comparison
I updated the version control comparison to include
Monotone and added a few sections.
I also fixed the CSS stylesheet a bit. Now it's working perfectly in Mozzila
, but MSIE 6.0 still ignores the max-width property. I also converted
to a slighly different XML format, which simpmlifies the DTD, and does not
require defining a new tag for each version control system.
svn-push
I wrote
a utility titled svn-push that can be used to propagate changesets
from one Subversion repository to the other a la BitKeeper's bk push
command. I actually started writing it in Perl, and Chia-Ling Kao's helped
me a bit there. It still did not work and exhibited a segfault which I could
not tell why it occured and had difficulties debugging it.
So I converted it to C, and afterwards Ben Collins-Sussman and Mike Pilato
helped me on the IRC to resolve the remaining problems. I finished writing
it, and went out biking. I eventually wrote a patch to subversion that puts
it in the contrib and builds it, because solving the dependencies is easier
to do from within the Subversion tree.
I only checked that it worked for local file:///... URLs. There's
still some work waiting there, but I'm waiting for my Linux system to
be able to work on it.
Israeli Perl Mongers Meeting
There was a Perl meeting yesterday. After I arrived there, I helped Gabor
shop for snacks and drinks. Then we mingled and had a good time chatting.
Ran Eilam showed us a relatively large laptop he bought with 1600*1200
display, a GeForce 5 card, and a battery life cycle of 1.5 hours. It was
pretty cool.
We then took a time for each to introduce himself. Some introductions sparked
a few discussions. There was something about the banking system switching
some internal systems to Perl. Then, Mikhael Goikhman lectured about Threads.
The lecture sparked quite a lot of questions and discussions. It eventually
lasted much more than was planned for it, but we still had a good time.
Afterwards, Gabor introduced Tcl for us Perl programmers. The introduction
went very fast, with some comments from a visiting Tcl guru that came to
the meeting especially. Then, I took a ride home with Offer Kaye, and we got
to talk about computer devices for blind people.
Reading
I read a few chapters off "The House of Arden", and also reading "Writing
Web Services with Perl", which I took from the perl mongers library. I also
read David A. Wheeler's
How to Evaluate Open Source Software article, which is quite good.
Objectivism and Neo-Tech
chalst - Neo-Tech is not a cult, albeit it may seem so
under first impressions. Neo-Tech is in fact, an extension of Objectivism that also integrates
such fields as Psychology or Business Management into one great integrated whole. Perhaps, its main step forward from traditional Objectivism is the fact that it recognizes that achieving bilogical immortality by technological means is a desirable goal. If you read the book of Ecclestias, you know that everything is meaningless because no matter what you do, and how good or bad you are, you will die eventually. Well, with biological immortality, everything becomes meaningful again.
BTW, you're the first person who have known Neo-Tech before that I encountered when telling people about it. When people ask for my philosophical/political orientation I usually say
I'm an Objectivist because there's a greater chance of people knowing what I'm talking about. (albeit in Israel, sadly, it is small as well.)
In any case, what did you think of my article? (I presume you read it, because Neo-Tech was mentioned there.) BTW, it seems that the Neo-Tech material was pulled off the web a
few days ago. I think it's a grave mistake on part of the
Neo-Tech proprietors because it was a very useful resource,
and you cannot do without a good web-presence nowadays. Maybe I'll write them about it.