Advogato blog for wannabe

6 Jan 2001

Sat, 6 Jan 2001 00:15:42 GMT

My father's computer got a virus. Argh. Guess who's going to have to fix it? Yep. (After two hours of boring work) "I-Worm.MTX". Nice thing. I'm lucky AVP could disinfect it ':-)

Quite work in Yang today. I've added the feature of having a "map" file, so you don't have to run the program every time you want to send a group to a different address. I'm going to test it well, because it's one of the main features of the program. I mean, it's going to be one of the most used ... if someone uses it at all :-) I didn't yet upload it O:-) I was trying to put it on my tripod page, but it seems that I've lost my password r:-) So I'll try to put it in GPUL's ftp one of these days.

BTW, having a good sleep is great :-)

3 Jan 2001

Wed, 3 Jan 2001 22:19:30 GMT

Sorry. I know I told you I would do a page for Yang, and some more things, but I just couldn't do it O:-) I had to drive my father to Xinzo de Limia, a town at approx. 150km from my house - and you couldn't believe how hard those 150km are: the weather was dreadful. A lot of rain (the car even slipped once =:-m) and wind (about 100km/h, the radio said), and the road is not the best in the world.

But all that was worth, because I saw one of the most beautiful things that you can see in these lands: the "Torre da Forxa" ("Tower of the Forge"). You see it when you go to the town, because that's a tower that's sit on the top of a little rocky hill. The rest of the land is very flat (it was a lagoon before), and so the tower seems to be there watching all the land. My english really limits what I want to say :-)

I thought that this tower was built in the middle ages, because that's what it looks like. But I was wrong: I asked in the local IRC channel (#xinzo) and there the guys told me that this tower, and two more that were built at the same time, are ... from the roman times! (yes, the Rome of Nero and Caesar) :-) And it's very well conserved, I must say. The guys in #xinzo told me that the tower forms part of a trio of them that were built in the roman times to watch the lands; they were communicated among them, though I don't know how r:-m

<plug>These are the times when I really love living here in Galicia :-) If you'd like to know more, you can visit the govt. page or, to get a more and less hyped result, try to ssearch "Galicia" in any search engine. Or you can mail me, but be warned: you can receive too much if you do that, I can be very passionate when speaking about these things O:-) (as this text shows :-D)</plug>

Nothing more done today. I was really tired when I got home. I don't know how the lorry drivers do, because if I had to drive all day ... well, I think I just couldn't do that r:-) Maybe tomorrow I'll do some useful thing.

3 Jan 2001

Wed, 3 Jan 2001 00:58:10 GMT

Today, jacobo will tell you about his JamLibPHP. He's very happy with its results, so don't let him down and tell him something pretty about it. Come on. He'll be so glad if you do that ... :-) ;-D

Being a little more serious: today I tried to install OpenBSD as I did before, but this time things got a little uglier: I almost lose my /home and "misc stuff" partitions =:-m Nasty. I knew that having 12 partitions in a 2GB hard drive wasn't a good idea :-)

Other things: I'm stuck with Yang, the news-mail gate. There's a few decisions that I have to make and that have not much relation to implementation, but to "general behaviour" of the program. I don't know yet how I'm going to do, but it doesn't seem to be a hard issue. I'll put a web page of it, I'll really do it :-) It's just that I feel a little afraid. Well, it has to be done so I'll try to do it tomorrow. Hey, maybe the program would be useful to someone :-m :-)

Besides, jacobo is really taking seriously his approach, and is making a lot of progress. And I love competition }:-) It turns me on, if you know what I mean %-) It's not that we're making two similar programs, but we're making programs to get the same goal. Which will be good, very good, if we both finish them and people use them. This drivel won't make any sense for you if you don't know what's Fidonet, anyway :-) Just ignore all this rant :-)

And to finish ... yeeessss, my usual rant about danish :-) I know you all love it, that's why I do it };-) Today I did nothing but looking a bit the danish grammar ... and taking the decision of not making another doc from the scratch. I wanted to do another "learnDanish-HOWTO", as I told several days before, but I think that I'm only going to "patch" the translation that a guy called "tsca" did. It's a great job, but it lacks IMHO a few more things about prepositions and conjunctions. Besides, I want to add many things that I learned using kanikus doc. So I'll write the guy and ask him for permission. That's what Open Source is about, isn't it? :-)

2 Jan 2001

Tue, 2 Jan 2001 01:16:07 GMT

Sorry for the delay O:-)

Ok. What's up with you, danish people? I mean I'm roaming every danish IRC channel that I find and people is always in complete silence there! :-) I guess it happens the same in every channel of every IRC server, but it's very frustrating when you want some help :-)

The danish learning thing keeps going. I think I already told you that I found I great danish grammar - in danish. So, for the while I'm only trying to find someone that helps me a little with some of the many words I don't understand r:-) I don't want to write again Kenneth for the moment, because I think I already "abused" him too much O:-) I'm already subscribed to sslug-misc, so I'll write and ask for help there. I'm sure the results will be much more successful than with IRC :-)

Not much more to tell these days. Nytår festivities and so on. I'm getting too old for those things. Maybe when my life gets back to the "non-ashaming" state I'll enjoy them ;-)

Oh, a funny thing: I joined a "Linux-OS/2" mailing list :-) The subject is about people that used OS/2 and now is trying Linux. Quite instructive, it's a new point of view - but since I used OS/2 myself, I don't think I can change my opinion of it anyway. The thing that I find most amusing is when some of them tells me: "Hey, we now have Gimp|Perl5.6|any-other-linux-program in OS/2!". Great, people. If you're going to port everything to OS/2, why use OS/2? :-m :-) Good people, anyway. Maybe I can bring some of them to the Good Side :-)

27 Dec 2000

Wed, 27 Dec 2000 23:44:41 GMT

Today I finally did a kind of alpha testing of the fidonet to news to mail gate that I'm planning. And it worked :-) Now I've got to do some real testing with it: feeding it with lotsa articles and so on. But anyway, it's a good start :-) I found some more people in IRC doing things alike. It's great that there's such a "movement" in this field. The problem is that everyone is doing it in his own way O:-)

It's getting harder to learn new things in danish :-/ I subscribed to SSLUG's "misc" mailing list, but it seems that nobody wrote today :-m Weird. Anyway, it's Xmas; so maybe in a few days the mails begin to appear. I'm thinking in "parking" danish for a while and dedicate my efforts to swedish or norwegian: they're very similar and maybe there's more active people in IRC ;-) Poor Kenneth must be fed up with my mails O:-) Tilgive mig, Kenneth :-) Today I'll look for a sslug-related channel in IRC. I'm sure there is one, though ... well, GPUL hasn't got one, maybe SSLUG hasn't either :-m

My short holiday ended. Today I've started again to study (there are exams in ... argh! three weeks! =:-m), and that will keep me a little from the other things I'd like to do. Not very much really, because if I said I studied so much that I didn't anything else I'd be lying O:-)

And what else? :-m I think that's all, today has been more of a TV watching day. Understand me: I hadn't seen "Antz" :-) And there's nothing more comforting to me that watching a good movie while having breakfast. Hey, there are people that like wearing black lingery; I'm not that weird ;-P

26 Dec 2000

Tue, 26 Dec 2000 23:47:38 GMT

Argh. I've been discovered. jacobo already knows who I am. Man, I really hate this thing of being famous.

A lot of changes

First of all, I'm now turgon@debian.org - yep, I'm a Debian member! :-) Now I have to solve a few problems with dupload that keep me from uploading my packages. If I don't do so maybe they kick me out of the gang =:-m (ouch).

I've done a mail-news gate. Yes, I know there are already a lot of them. Yes, I know they all work well. It just happened that I wanted to do something with a different approach :-) The program is called YANG ("Yet Another News Gate"), and I'll put a webpage with it soon. It works quite well, though it needs a little "real life" tuning. My first aim with it was reading and writing news with Mutt, and now it seems to do that so well that I thought I'd put it on public domain :-P One of the things that kept me from releasing it is that the code is *awful* O:-) But you'll see when it's out.

I'm learning danish, thanks to Kenneth Christiánsen (kanikus?). He has a LearnDanish-HOWTO that was my first help in doing that. I'm sure you think that, following the tradition, I should put here something in danish. Keep waiting ;-) Learning danish has had in me the effect of having a lot of curiosity for new languages. I plan to learn german and dutch some day. Of course, I won't learn any of these languages to a "master" level; but if I achieve a good practical written level I'll be happy. Maybe I learn swedish too, since it's quite similar to danish; but for now, I'm just playing with the idea. Maybe I stop with all this language thing in a few weeks, maybe I don't. We'll see; it's funny anyway :-) I'll do my own "Learning-Danish-HOWTO" these days, taking the info from Kenneth's doc, another one I found on the Internet and my own personal experience and thoughts. I've tried to hang on some danish IRC channels, but people seem to be quite busy with queries, because when I'm there nobody speaks. I can't believe they already hate me - it usually takes four or five minutes to do so ;-)

The language thing came, besides Kenneth's howto, when a friend showed me the music of Hedningarna, a swedish/finnish "folk" (you'd understand why I put it like that if you'd listened to it) group. Well, and of course the "The 13th Warrior" film: those norsemen just looked soooo cooooool ... :-P

In October the Arroutada Party took place in A Corunna (Galicia, Spain). I was there, of course. I did a shitty web-based inscription engine for the Real Time Battle contest. Since I didn't had any robot in the contest, it was one form of "being there" too :-) And what's more important, I was given an "Organization Person" identity card! Yeah! %-) The network was not as good as I'd wished (my RJ45 plug was awful), but anyway it was great. Funnier than Campus Party, which maybe you heard of. I'm looking forward to Xuventude Galicia Net, another party that will take place in a few months. I'm thinking on taking part on the Quake III contest, because I want to know wether I'm good or not, and the only way to do it is playing with the pros :-) It was not easy to have Q3 running in my computer: it seems that my sound card (with a CS461x chip) is not that well supported in ALSA, and I had to look everywhere to search about it. At last, I found that the familiar "signal 11" error that Q3 gave whenever I tried to run it was due to the driver not doing mmap properly. I found a patch somewhere in the 'Net, and now I put the driver on "hold" status. It was for all this search (and a big but not told here "try and fail" proccess) why I couldn't play Q3 in the Arroutada Party. But anyway, now I'm ready :-)

Today I learned by ear the "Muiñeira de Chantada", typical folk song here which is played with a bagpipe - though I play it with guitar :-) I'm sure that if some purist listened to it the way I play it he/she will kill me, but it's quite funny to do things in new ways ;-) Maybe one of this days I "commit" something and tape it for you to listen, my dear public. But don't expect anything good: first I would have to buy a real jack, and not the loud-noise-emitter wiring that I have now.

Enough for now. I'll write something more tomorrow.

26 Dec 2000

Tue, 26 Dec 2000 01:12:08 GMT

Back!

Since ... eek, September 10th. Too much time without a diary entry. Now I'm quite tired (hey, it's 2 am here and I'm not as much an "owl" as most programmers), so I'll just say that I'm back (you already read that, I know) and that I have quite a lot of things to tell :-)

Tomorrow I'll tell the details. Now I'm going to bed. Merry Christmas and so on :-)

10 Sep 2000

Sun, 10 Sep 2000 22:19:37 GMT

Once upon a time, someone thought that the best way to measure your knowledge was making you a written test in which you (supposedly) would show that you knew enough to be "apt" (no, not the Debian tool). And so, exams were invented.

That person was evil! :-)

Ok, I shouldn't complain too much, as today was quite a light study day. My stomach, always helpful, decided that it would hurt all day long to make my day easier. Great, isn't it?

Anyway, studying (or more exactly: trying to study) has in me the positive effect of making me think on any other unrelated thing. It seems that the more I need to study, the more ideas pop in my mind. Weird. There must be a scientific reason for that, and I'm sure it's something bad :-)

Today's Big Idea (tm) was play a little with CDK (Curses Development Kit) for Perl. The thing has something to do with the fact that Fidonet (a BBS network, spread all over the world) is quite dead nowadays. I was thinking that maybe if the software used for it in linux was easier to configure, more people would try to put a BBS online. Or maybe not, who knows. But I need an excuse to do something with CDK, and that would be a fine one :-)

And not much more. Heat. Too much heat. Hopefully, next week weather will begin to cool down. I hope so.

9 Sep 2000

Sat, 9 Sep 2000 23:22:01 GMT

Today news: the openbsd box is using the linux box as gateway. It was quite easy, at least when I decided not to use ipmasq and just download the HOWTO and follow what it said. Now I've to know how ipf and ipnat work to do the reverse thing :-)

I don't know what you (the imaginary reader) would think about all these things I tell here. I mean, it seems to me that everyone would read this and just think that what I tell is not very ... well, very proper of Advogato.Org. I don't know, when you read about all this people doing things like hacking GNOME, or being sysadms, or the owners of some high-volume web site ... I feel that what I do is quite boring and lacking of interest r:-) It's like a child trying to imitate the adult ones.

The paranoia pre-exams is beginning. Or maybe I'm just having too much coffee :-)

6 Sep 2000

Wed, 6 Sep 2000 23:23:07 GMT

Today news: I've got an ethernet card! :-) So I can connect my two computers. Goooood. They're already connected by now, actually :-) Tomorrow I'll begin to try masquerading, both with the linux box and with the openbsd one. And all those things that I thought before having the card but now I can't remember r:-)

And not much more to tell. I've been re-certificated as Apprentice by jbowman, may God bless thee and give you a lot of children. When is the "Journeyer" certificate coming? ;-)

My "Things-to-do-after-exams" list is growing dangerously. Besides tidying up some little scripts & programs I've done for my own use (I hope to release some of then someday, that's why I want to have them clean and well-behaved), I have to learn about LDAP and PAM, I want to do a web for a realtimebattle contest in october, another web for my own stuff, learn more XSL (there's things I can't even imagine how to do) ... quite a lot for the 2 weeks before classes start :-)

Anyway, that's alright. It's fun :-)

And nothing more today. Logging out.