Older blog entries for walters (starting at number 14)

Whee. Long time no diary entry. I've been pretty busy lately working on Debian. Having a four week break from school is great!

In other news, my school's Open Source Club is getting some new members, and a lot of people are interested and working on projects. It's neat to have the feeling that one is creating something that will last for years after one has left.

And finally, if you're a roller blader, and you haven't been to Central Park in Manhattan, you have to go. By far the best skating I've ever had. Lots of interesting things going on, plenty of beautiful girls, and there are hills and such to get going very fast on. Highly recommended.

Well, despite the fact that finals are over, and I should be feeling relieved, I can't keep up with the projects that I'm working on. I hate the thought that some of them have to suffer. Unfortunately, none of them are in a state where I could hand them off to someone else. Sigh. Maybe I'll instead spend my waking hours figuring out how to remove my need for sleep...

I'm often hacking on my TiBook at coffee shops and whatnot, and realize that hey, I need foo, where foo is some Debian package. So, I wrote this little bash alias to let you say apt-get remember foo, and it will ask you if you want to install foo next time you do an install or upgrade.

function apt-get()
{
    case $1 in
 remember) if [ $# == 1 ]; then test -f 
~/.apt-remember && cat ~/.apt-remember; else \
     shift; echo $@ >> ~/.apt-remember; fi ;;
 install|upgrade|dist-upgrade) \
 { if [ -s ~/.apt-remember ]; then \
  echo "You have the following packages 
remembered for installation:"; \
  cat ~/.apt-remember; \
  echo -n "Install them now? [y/n/e] "; \
  read answer; \
  case $answer in 
      y*|Y*) command apt-get install `cat 
~/.apt-remember` && mv ~/.apt-remember 
~/.apt-remember.done;; 
      e|erase) rm -f ~/.apt-remember ;;
      *) ;; 
  esac; \
  fi; \
  command apt-get $@ ; } ;;
 *) command apt-get $@ ;;
    esac
}

In case the above is messed up for some reason, the canonical version is here. (update: And I notice that Mozilla has conveniently wrapped my input, completely destroying the shell script. Snarf it the link.)

And in other news, the deity package in unstable rocks. I love the ability to play tetris while packages download!

Sweet! I got my TiBook (space-ghost) back from Apple repairs! Those bastards reinstalled MacOS, but no big deal. It will shortly be re-erased and replaced with the universal operating system. One thing I did notice is that they must have had to replace the whole motherboard, because I have a different MAC address now. Anyways, now that I have my mobile GNOME/PostgreSQL/ORBit development machine back, and with no screen flicker, I'm a happy camper.

Hm, maybe I'll try to use XFS as / this time. It's been really sweet on my ia32 box.

If you haven't seen the 404 handlers on www.sgi.com or www.penguinppc.org, they're highly recommended viewing.

Today featured far too much statistics studying for my taste. Computing the summed squares of 25 sample values is not my cup of tea. I will be very, very glad when this quarter is over. Strangely enough, it is over for one of my friends, who just graduated. He got his B.S. in Math in 4 years...I'm still chugging along on my B.S. in Computer Science. It seems really difficult to finish college in four years, these days...

Jordi: I know what you mean about doing other things when exams come around; Autumn quarter, duing exam week, I wrote a useless GNOME applet rather than study :)

pjones: Yeah, my friend and I are following debian-sparc, where bcollins just posted that davem just got X running locally. I'm really impressed how fast people can write these drivers...

Well, last night I helped one of my friends install the universal operating system on his new Sun Blade 100. .After unsuccessfully trying to convince OpenFirmware to boot from the floppy, we netbooted it from the woody tftpboot.img, which worked flawlessly. Unfortunately, X didn't want to run. Regardless, at $1100 US for machine + 17in monitor + shipping, they seem like quite a deal. Having a real 64 bit machine would be nice.

During the installation, we played Armagetron. If you're looking for a cool, Free game to play, definitely check this one out. It's even networkable!

My Tae Kwon Do instructor gave me a green belt, which was very gratifying. I hope to work hard over the summer to earn my black belt back. It is kind of fustrating to remember all the stuff that one could do before, but to have to relearn it all. Still, it's quite a satisfying feeling at the end of those two hours of class, knowing that I'm making progress.

Advogato is pretty cool. I've got to convince more of my local friends to join.

jacob: Well, what's the point of having all these cool GNU features if we can't use them? After all, many projects nowadays implicitly depend on GNU make. I see depending on GCC as merely an extension of that. When was the last time you tried to build your projects with BSD make and ash? :)

So, after buying new bearings and wheels for my speed skates, I decided to spend even more money resuscitating my old Hypnoskates. When I first got these things, people on campus totally stared at me as I skated up to a building door at high speed, removed my blades in about two seconds, and walked in. Then I lost one of the axles, and found out that they use a non-standard (7mm) axel size. It took a year to find a new 7mm axel, but the guy at my local skate shop finally managed to locate axels I could use. Now I'm back in business. Hehehe. Pedestrians, fear.

Random advertisement: Are you an Emacs afficionado? Hang out on #emacs on the openprojects IRC network! We love to answer questions about using Emacs and Elisp hacking!

Whee, very unproductive day today. I played around with ORBit a bit more today for work. I'm getting closer to convincing my manager to dump RMI for CORBA. We do a lot of Perl programming, and being able to talk to our database application server using Perl would be nice for those Perl people in the department. And I'd be able to write applications in GNU C + GNOME. Which reminds me, GNU C rocks! Named static struct initializers and nested fuctions are cool, but my favorite feature has to be ({ ... }). Functional programming in C!

The weather was so beautiful while I was coding earlier this afternoon that I decided it was time to buy new wheels and bearings for my skates. It cost me a good $120 US, but it was totally worth it; I go like twice as fast! But of course, as soon as I was out for two minutes on my newly revamped skates, flying by started pedestrians, it startled to rain. Blah.

Now, if only I could write diary entries like this:

Every weekend, in malls across America, guys hit on girls and dine on food-court Chalupas and Mountain Dew, then go off to buy the new Tool CD. Why am I not among them? Because while they're spending genuine quality time in fluorescent-lit shopping corridors, stupid me is off becoming a blood brother of the Blackfoot Indians or observing a Haitian voodoo ceremony. Well, I'm sick of it! I want better. I want to watch the DVD of Miss Congeniality in my bathrobe! I want to blow my money on scratch-off lottery tickets! I want to make my ass go numb sitting on the floor playing Donkey Kong 64 all day! I don't think that's so much to ask.

It's been two weeks since I sent my TiBook to Apple for repairs. Siiiigh.

Well, I spent the weekend learning how to do kernel stuff. I installed User Mode Linux, and wrote a little device. Programming kernel stuff is interesting. It poses different challenges than normal userspace stuff. Incidentally, did I mention how much UML rocks? Aside from the coolness factor of running Debian inside Debian, it's a very painless way to write kernel stuff which isn't directly tied to the hardware. Being able to step through my driver with GDB is just too cool.

New SUV holds eight passengers and their SUVs.

Sometimes, I wish I was as smart as the people who write for The Onion.