Older blog entries for superant (starting at number 66)

Well, my boss did something that makes me crazy (mad as in rabid) She said it is Karen's birthday, so could I cover the phones, so everyone else could go out to lunch. WHAT!!! so of course I said ok. See what bad child rearing can do.

I have given 10 computers to an after school program and 15 computers to a middle school. With the cooperation of 3 orgs we have managed to move some computers.

I am going to buy a new computer. The time has finally come. I am going to CompUsa tonight. I'm more excited than me on my wedding night.

I got the check for the review of RH 8.0. That and the year end bonus from work and I am ready to buy some tech! Charlotte says I should use it for fun. Fsck the bills.

Had fun meeting Alex and his wife. The Linux CDs seem to work, but I should upgrade the X servers. I need to learn more about auto detecting video cards.

I have 30 old pentiums at work I need to find a home for, I am looking for a poor school or similar project.

The bootable Linux CD with Tkfp is also ready. That is a good thing because Dr. Caldwell's talk is this week. ;-)

Next perhaps I will put GnuMed on a CD.

Well, RubyConf was fun. I should have given a more entertaining talk, but I will get better with practice.

Now I am working on making a bootable CD for Dr. Caldwell to use in his presentation at Open Source Health Care Conference at UCLA on Nov 16.

Big job, but I think it will be ready. Need to increase the size of the initrd boot image and fix the browser startup problem.

Thanks to chipx86 for the website redesign.

Turned in my review of RH 8.0. I was very impressed. That is saying alot, since I have been a Debian only user for the last few years. Charlotte asked if I was going to keep it on the machine. I probably would if it worked perfectly with .debs ;-)

Now I MUST focus on Ruby, no reading SF, no distractions. Only 3 weeks before the RubyConf presentation.

Reading the autobiography of Beryl Markham, the woman aviator from Africa. It is holding my interest.

Have to work the office on Saturday. Must..find...more..time. AARGH

OK, Dr Dobbs Linux Digest is out. Mostly links about cluster and Beowulf software.

I am having a hard time preparing my RubyConf presentation. Chroot is kicking me in the butt. Guess what? strace error messsages don't tell you everything. AARGH

Charlotte and I are going out of town for 3 days. We need a vacation!

After watching Enterprise last night I had disturbing thoughts about the type of SF females that we fans like. Looking at Seven of Nine, T'Pol, and Scully, I find they are all disconnected from their emotional response. They have a flattening of affect that results in non emotional interactions with others and very little response to events in the outside world. Of course a Vulcan like T'Pol has a complete excuse for this with the Vulcan religion of suppression of all emotion. But even Hoshi, who has no excuse, seems to have a curious lack of diversity in her emotional response. She is either afraid or resigned to follow orders.

I am concerned that this reflects badly on us SF fans. We like women who we can look at, and think of as sexual objects, without any chance of them responding in any emotional way. They will not be angry, or hardly even recognize that they are being treated sexually. ``Kiss what is kiss?'', as Altaira says in Forbidden Planet. And don't even get me started with Captain Janeway, she makes a better android than Data. Is it time for us to grow up, or should we continue to wallow in our self indulgent hedonism? A real woman[TM] likes to shop for hours, watch romance movies, gets upset when there are large spiders in the house.

Uh, computer software, uh, I'm thinking about it.

Ok, I patched the kernel so I can see my XFS partition:

After downloading and unzipping:

patch -p 1 -u < ../xfs-2.4.19-all-i386

Then I did a make dep ; make modules ; make modules_install After adding to lilo.conf I was back in business.

I have to work on Dr. Dobbs! No more laziness, no more procrastination, no more petting the cat!

Compiled Linux kernel 2.4.19 no problems. It booted fine. Now I just need to patch it to include XFS. Or reformat my partition that uses XFS ;-).

Reinstalled Plex86 by
apt-get install plex86
dpkg-reconfigure plex86-kernel-src

It worked like a charm to test booting Small Linux. Also installed Java and Flash for Mozilla yesterday. And tested a ruby irc bot with dancer-ircd. When things work they just work.

I feel stressed today: want to work on boot cd - need to get Dr Dobbs together - have to work 8 hours a day. AARGH

Well I don't actually work 8 hours, but my body is physically in or around the office for 9 hours and I spend more than an hour driving my car to or from.

Charlotte and I are planning a three day getaway the end of this month. No internet connection. Will I survive?

I should be able to test the CD boot process with Plex86 I have never tried a CD boot with Plex86. But I have been using my clever little trick to test the bootable CD without having to burn any actual CDs. That however means I am not actually testing that first step of the (boot up, kernel load, root disk mounting, rebooting onto live CD) So Plex86 should allow me to test those steps. I hope.

My rubyconf presentation is on Sunday, so I plan on spending another day in Victoria.

Am working on a presentation laying out the boot process for a Linux CD and support for all kinds of Ruby programs.

Charlotte is back to work.

I would like to compile a 2.4.18 kernel and try to make a small footprint one. I know that the embedded/PDA kernels must be small. So I should be able to get one for x86.