Older blog entries for stevej (starting at number 20)

Sometimes it takes drawing a picture to make certain things painfully obvious. For instance, I thought that having a peer of networks who only talked to two other peers was a good idea until I realized, after drawing a picture in Dia, that when sending a message to your two other peers, you would only have a network of depth 1... duh! You end up with a circle. Not good. Not at all. Here's the picture.

I've been watching a lot of TeeVee lately. Ms. Stacy noticed that Jeri Ryan on Star Trek Voyager has big jugs. I pulled my amazing skills of knowing stupid TV trivia tricks out of my bag. My pal Rosco noted when I lived back in Oregon that I could always place somebody in a TV show as having been on another show somewhere else at sometime. He used to laugh at me but I could consistently pull it off. Tonight I noticed Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall and the guy who played Elaine's boss in Seinfeld. No alien foreheads could fool me!

And now we know why I don't watch TV anymore... I'd rather sic my obsessive-compulsive disorder on programming langauges and punk bands.

Even me, in my great media blackout, know every little detail about Tuesday terrorist attacks.

My uncle was in a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, luckily he's fine.

In other news, I wrote a Python script to work as an introducer for Whisper

I'll post it tomorrow.

Enterprise JavaBeans are the muddiest, half-assed architecutre I've experienced in a long time. If I was one of the Sun engineers who built this crap, I'd be ashamed.

Going to finish my brainbench certification in it next week.

shoot me.

It dawned on me that the E promise architecture is basically multicast asynchronous callbacks masquerading as immediate return calls. It's the second kind of obvious, where it's obvious after you figure it out or somebody tells you.

I'll have to ask the list about their opinion on that.

They say that there are no dumb questions.

only stupid questioners.

Boy, ignatz has some teen angst left in him. Off to Fight Club for him. ;-)

In non-geek news, I saw Apocolypse Now Redux the other night. huzzah! Fuck the critics, I thought it was great. Yes, it was 3 1/2 hours. No, it didn't feel long or bloated.

Played with Process Algebra, made some breakthrough progress on my parser, playing with some MOM b2b tasty treats.

Oh, and I moved my desktop (again) to linux. Running redhate 7.0 with the nVidia binary drivers, (and locked up my machine good a few times overclocking my video card with nvclock). kernel 2.4.9 is on here. The documentation lies, my full gig of RAM is not seen without the BIGMEM patch.

fuckers.

more tomorrow (today) after sleep (coma).

You know what's weird? I installed Scheme on my desktop before I even installed a JDK and E. No, it means nothing.

Spent the weekend with my girl. Forgot my Go book with her today. :-( Just when I learning the intracacies of Kageme and Two Me.

Today I:

• enjoyed my george foreman grill. I made some soy patties.
• actually worked hard on my parser but didn't write more than a dozen lines of code.
• watched a cheesy movie which could have been really good
• thought about revamping my resume.
• oh, my 13w3->svga converter showed up. goddamned irix won't let me in. At least linux has a nice single-user mode. I guess I'll have to either acquire IRIX media somewhere or just say fuck it and pass the indy off to somebody else. I can definitely see it being a major time-suck for me.

Oh yes. the Indy's hardware specs:
150Mhz R5000, 8bit graphics, 64M RAM, 500M HD.

I recently aquired an indy r5000. I have no idea of it's specs, as I'm still waiting for my 13w3->svga converter so I can fire up the bastard. FYI, Libnet compiles on irix 6.2

Also, I've been working on my Java version of a parser for Casper. It's recognizing variable declarations now! I'll put the code online soon. I'm building a non- deterministic recursive decent parser using Steve Metsker's framework for building such beasts.

This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Spent yesterday and today fighting with setting up Alexandria, which is the software SourceForge wrote to run their site.

Also working on my rd parser for OpenCSP.

I'm glad to see that news coverage is as bad in other countries as it is in ours.

In other news, I started adding all sorts of #define's in libnet-headers.h so that I could easily have access to all the packet flags (SYN, RST, PSH, URG, ACK) when calling libnet_build_tcp() but then I realized that it's just easier to add the existing constants together. Let me explain for people like me:

(in libnet-headers.h):

#ifndef TH_FIN
#define TH_FIN    0x01
#endif
#ifndef TH_SYN
#define TH_SYN    0x02
#endif
#ifndef TH_RST
#define TH_RST    0x04
#endif
#ifndef TH_PUSH
#define TH_PUSH   0x08
#endif
#ifndef TH_ACK
#define TH_ACK    0x10
#endif
#ifndef TH_URG
#define TH_URG    0x20
#endif

What was immediately obvious to me is that when you add any two or three values together, you'll have a new distinct value. What's funny is that instead of just realizing I should add them together while calling lib_build_tcp(), I thought it'd be easier (and more useful to others) if I added a shitload of new constants. like TH_SYN_FIN_RST_PUSH_URG, etc.

What is wrong with my peer group? Get a little cooze in an IRC channel and everybody becomes a moron.

How did I magically become un-certified? I really don't understand advogato's certification implementation. And yes, I've read the spec. No, I'm not a moron.

I'm taking a few days off from my ERTP stuff to write a paper on E and to finish getting Java2 certified. Also swimming in Sacramento.

I shall return Monday with renewed vigor!