Advogato blog for topher

28 Dec 2002

Sat, 28 Dec 2002 08:06:16 GMT

I've decided to start working on http://topher.zyp.org, as a personal homepage for myself. I'll start with just throwing up some random crap that I've been meaning to put on the web, and eventually, I'll try to make it into a "real" web site.

I guess we'll see what happens.

11 Oct 2001

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 06:53:42 GMT

I'm such a domain whore.

With the recent opening of the .info domains, I registered cashell.info, to use as my new "personal" home page domain, as well as wiki.info to host all of the Wiki's I feel an unstoppable urge to create, and geeks.info, which I'll use to showcase me and a bunch of friends.

Sometimes I can't help but look in the mirror and think "Dork.". ;-)

11 Oct 2001

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 06:47:30 GMT

I'm finding myself to be a huge fan of Wiki's lately. In fact, I think my next project will be porting WikkiTikkiTavi, a nice PHP Wiki, to use PostgreSQL.

Is it wrong to want to set up a PersonalWiki, as well as Wiki's for two (maybe three!) separate projects you are working on? Oh, and I can think of a topic or two that could benefit from a Wiki, as well. ;-)

8 Oct 2000

Sun, 8 Oct 2000 07:58:16 GMT

Laziness...

I didn't do much of anything today. I spent most of the day sitting on the couch watching College Football. Seeing as I live in Omaha, Nebraska, this is part of our religion, you see. There is no better thing to do on a Saturday than watch the Nebraska Cornhusker's play. (Yes, it really is almost like a religion here. In some small Nebraska towns, shops actually close up during the games.)

Job Search...

Well, it's time to get moving on the job search. I dropped another resume for a Linux Sys Admin job Friday, which would be nice. This is a good town for getting jobs.

The Pacific Northwest...

suso: Seattle rocks. ;-)

I was born and grew up in the good ol' Midwest, specifically, Omaha, Nebraska. I spent three years living in Washington State, though, and it is truly a great place to be. The weather is, contrary to popular belief, awesome. While it does get a lot of rain, the stories are over exaggerated. As far as simple quantity, it actually gets less rain than most major cities on the East coast. The difference is that what they call 'rain', everyone else call 'misty drizzle'. It *never* actually rains hard. The summers tend to be mostly sunny and in the upper 70s to mid 80s, while the winter tends to be mostly 40s and 50s. You know how in the midwest, we count the days below 0 degrees F? Up there, they count the days below freezing. They cancelled school once, and you could still see the grass through the snow.

It's beautiful country, too. Tons of tall evergreen trees, hills, mountains, waterfalls, the ocean...it's breathtaking. And there is a lot to do, as well. Within hours, you can be in the mountains, at the beach, in a rainforest....heck, in 5 hours you can be in Canada. ;-)

Oh, well. Back to reality. I want to go back to Washington eventually. But, it's not gonna happen right now.

The Tests...

Well, I took the two tests I had. Unfortunately, they were pathetic. Two of the eastiest tests I've had.

The Calc test I was worried about. I'm generally good in Math, even when I don't care for it, but I wasn't well prepared for this test. I was at least 3 chapters behind on homework, maybe more (shows how bad I've been, I'm not even sure where the class is right now;-). A girl in my class has had this professor before, and warned us that his test were extremelly hard. So, I went in expecting the worst. It had to be one of the easiest math tests I've taken. I was hoping to just pass, now I'm thinking I prolly pulled a 90% or so. Out of ten questions, there were only two I didn't feel confident with my answers, and one of them I know I was close.

The other test was American National Government. The professor only does two tests through the semester, so I was thinking these would be pretty rough. I was way off. It was 25 questions, multiple choice. I walked out, finished, in 20 minutes. It was really that easy.

Life is good. ;-)

4 Oct 2000

Wed, 4 Oct 2000 06:09:27 GMT

The Hunt...

Well, the job hunt is still on. Although, it's sort of on hold until I finish the two tests I have coming up on Thursday. I'm having a tough time studying for one of them, though, because it seems likely that whatever new job I take will require me to drop it. That's the problems with full time jobs and daytime classes. Oh, well. I can hope, anyway.

LaTeX...

Michael: I, for one, would be very interested in a site like you proposed. I've just recently become interested in LaTeX, as I progress into the desire for finer control than is capable with LyX (which is a most excellent program, I must say.) I would love a site that contained different types of LaTeX documents. My LaTeX skills are rather limited at the moment, but if there's anything I can do to help out, let me know.

The IRC Pain...

I've discovered just how much of a pain it is to try to IRC from a single remote terminal window, while chatting on 4 active channels and managing 2-4 queries. Text based clients, through a single window, just can't handle this kind of thing well. The pain of trying to converse this way is wearing on me. If I weren't such a hopeless addict, I'd find something more productive to do with my time.

The Scheme...

dnm: I was intrigued by your comments on Scheme, and I found your project for the R6RS work. I have only recently discovered what an amazing thing Lisp (and particularly Scheme) is, but I've already come to love it. If there is anything I can do to help, just let me know. I'd be very interested in participating however I can working towards the new report and/or standard.

2 Oct 2000

Mon, 2 Oct 2000 05:18:08 GMT

The Return...

Well, I seem to have returned. Like so many others around here, I kept up with my journal entries really well for a while, but then real life rudely interupted, and I've been bad about it lately. I'm hoping to do better, though. ;-)

The Job...

Well, on Wednesday, I quit my job. Been there for three and a half years, and during an argument with my boss, I realized I had absolutely no desire to work there anymore. So I told him to take me off the schedule and that I was leaving the company.

And I'm feeling great about it. ;-)

Now, what has to be the most amazing thing, which almost caused me to fall out of my chair, about an hour after I got home from quiting work, I got a call from a company asking me to come in and interview for a recent opening they had. Is that out there, or what? I've been walking around waiting for lightning to strike me or something, because things like that do *not* happen in real life. Not in my life, anyway. ;-)

As if that wasn't good enough, I've managed to land two additional interviews for next week, with the possibility of a third. I only wonder why I waited as long as I did to quit. I think it's one of those things where you just get really comfortable, and it's more convenient to just keep doing a job, even if you don't like it much, than to deal with finding another one.

The only major downside is that I'm prolly gonna have to go full time, and I don't know that I can find a job that will work around my schedule as well as my last one did. So, the couple of classes I'm taking during the days might have to get dropped and retaken later. Not good, but such is life.

The Lightning Strikes...

I should have just shut up and been happy. Now I'm paying for it.

A week or so ago, I upgraded my Debian box to XFree86 4.0.1, using the experimental Debian packages. Everything worked great. Life was good. The only odd thing, is that on starting up X, if I started an Eterm, it took about 60-90 seconds before the text would be displayed. And if I started an X-Chat session without waiting a minute or two, X would crash on me. Oh, well, minor issues.

Today, I upgraded to the newest Debian package for X-4.0.1. Then I started my Eterm, prepared to wait a bit, and without thinking, I started up X-Chat. As previously mentioned, X died on me. However, this time it didn't just crash. It crashed and burned.

Help me!!!

As of now, I can't get my monitor to display anything. Upon powering it on, it will enter powersave mode within 3-4 seconds. I've tried everything I can think of, including going so far as to hook it up to a seperate working box (the one I'm typing this on, in fact) and it will not stay out of power save. I've got this terrible feeling that something in that last crash managed to hose my monitor for real. My monitor should still be covered by warranty, but if anyone out there happens to have any ideas at al on fixing this without sending it in, I would really like to hear from you. Please e-mail me at <topher at zyp dot org> with any suggestions. The monitor is a Panasonic PanaSync S70. Two years old, prior to this, ran absolutely beautifully, without a hint of trouble.

The Advert...

Okay, as if my monitor dying wasn't bad enough, it gets worse. I just got a phone call, at 12:15 am. It was one of those stupid recorded message phone call things, and the blasted thing was an advertisement. Unfortunately, the caller ID came up blank, and *69 wouldn't give me the number. I'd love to report that company to the Better Business Bureau, because that is really a bad thing when someone does that. We're talking after midnight, here. Sheesh.

5 May 2000

Fri, 5 May 2000 04:24:34 GMT

School...

Done. Last final was today.

Anime...

Just talked to a good friend of mine, and found out that Princess Mononoke is playing at a theater in Lincoln (Which is about 40 miles from Omaha, where I am). This looks like a very cool movie.

My all time favorite Anime is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was also done by Miyazaki (the guy doing this one). If this can manage to be even close to half as good as Nausicaa was, then I'll be in heaven seeing it on the big screen. ;-)

Hackage...

Nil. Been too busy with studying and stuff.

Reading...

I'm nearly finished with Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I should have been done days ago, but studying had to take priority. It's been an interesting, and very worthwhile, read. If you like Douglas Adams, you'll prolly thoroughly enjoy this book.

Annoying...

I hate it when I really want to listen to a CD, and I can't find it. My Us And Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd CD is missing. I really hope that turns up soon, because I really love that album. ;-)

Work...

Just when I was feeling good, Work had to go and screw it up. They've called me in for tomorrow morning. What does this mean? This means I'm going to miss out on the ultimate in sleeping in time, that prime selection of "Morning after finals" sleeping in. Ah, well. I guess such is life. At least I only have to work for 3 hours tomorrow. ('Course, working at 8am is the worst possible 3 hours....)

3 May 2000

Wed, 3 May 2000 06:55:13 GMT

School...

The joys of school. I took my second to last final today, in my Business Communications class. This one really din't worry me much, since I managed a 96% on the first test, and a 98% on the second. It was actually a halfway interesting class, if kinda easy.

It was kinda interesting, though, I was asked by my professor to get her some information on teaching at the local Community College that I teach at. It seems she recently had a baby, and she's considering doing that part time, instead of teaching at the University full time.

Microsoft Stupidity...

I was glancing through the free copy of InfoWorld that shows up every week (despite the fact that I don't remember ever subscribing for it), and came across an interesting, if somewhat scary, article. It's in Ed Foster's latest column.

Basically, it describes how Microsoft is going to start disallowing OEM's to include Windows installation CDs with the computer systems they sell. They're taking a fairly quiet stance, and basically telling OEM's to tell customers themselves. They're also forcing OEM's to come up with their own solution to this problem. Something of a, "Yeah, we're screwing the customer over and making life damn inconvenient for them. And what's worse, is we're going to screw you over and make you deal with it. You get to tell them what's going on, and you get to try to fix it." Of course, their solutions are subject to Microsoft approval....meaning it has to be a CD locked to *that* specific machine, or an image on the hard drive, or something like that.

I think this has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I can't count the number of times I've had to reinstall Windows, or even pull out the CD so it could copy files when adding new hardware. The inconvenience this is going to cause is mind boggling.

This whole 'medialess' OS thing is supposed to reduce piracy....but, after thinking about it, I almost think this will increase the number of pirated copies of Windows that are floating around. Why? Becuase people will be forced to pirate copies of the retail version just so they can reinstall or fix their existing Windows installations.

I dunno who came up with this new policy, but I can't help but feel they must be truly clueless.

Hacking...

I think I've come up with an idea to waste my summer with. I've pretty much worked out an idea for a program that will include just about all the programming technologies that I'm interested in, but have never, so far, gotten around to playing with. This halfway impressive list inlcudes, but is not limited to:

Graphical Interface Programming
GTK
Gnome
zlib
XML
LDAP
Basic encryption
Some sort of module interface
Autoconf/Automake
Anything else I can fit in ;-)

I'm thinking the best way to really dig into this stuff, is to actually use it in a program. This looks like it's going to be a very educational, if busy, summer.

I'll post a better description of the program as I flesh out the details in a tangible format.

Work...

Work sucks, especially when I'm only going to get about 4 hours of sleep due to my bad habit of staying up and playing when I shouldn't be....doing things like making diary entries on a certain site.

28 Apr 2000

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 21:38:46 GMT

labisso: You aren't wasting your money with that book. However, do make sure you get the second edition. The C Programming Langauge, 2nd Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie is truly one of the best books I've ever read. It manages to capture all of the elegance, power, and efficiency of the C langauge and explain it accordingly.

It isn't an introduction to programming type book, however. It assumes that you are either comfortable with programming logic, or have access to a friend who is. If you are already comfortable with a different language, though, I know of no better book to learn C from.

Other recommendations, would be The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike. It has a wealth of tips, suggestions, hints, and good knowledge. The kind of stuff that really helps when you're programming.

28 Apr 2000

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 16:47:21 GMT

ingvar: I'm positive that the 3com 3c905b-tx cards work in Linux, and it should work in any 2.2.x kernel, I believe. I know that it at least works in the later ones. A guy at work is using one in a Linux box right now, in fact (He's using a 2.2.14 kernel, just upgraded from a 2.2.12). The corect kernel driver for this card is 3c59x.o, so make sure you got that one....there's quite a few 3com drivers in there, so it's easy to miss it.

If that still isn't getting it, you might want to check IRQ's and make sure that there isn't some kind of conflict going on. Especially in slighty older machines (slower than 300MHz), where they didn't know how to share IRQs properly, it's easy to come up with those.

In general, I would prolly suggest upgrading to a 2.2.14 kernel either way, as it does provide some important updates. If you still can't get it to work, let me know and I'll see if I can come up with anything else. (My job for the past three years as a cable modem installer involves doing a *lot* of NIC installations. ;-)