Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 5)

Woke-up at 10:30, reached my class of "Shell Scripting" at the proper time: 11:30. Taught them about readline, aliases and shell varriables. Also gave them a little intro. to OOP in C. After that I stayed at the Univ. for the 2nd class of "Linux System Administration" at 16:00. Taught them vi(m).

I was in a mood to go out for the dinner. When my friend Zeeshan (same name :) came to meet me, We went to a Chinese (you would'nt find any Chinese around) restaurant. I love the 'Chicken Thai Soup' they make.

At night (11:30) when i logged into my system and connected to the internet, I came across something i was searching for: DocBook Website. I was glad to see a deb with the name docbook-website in my apt repo. I immediatelly downloaded/installed it and started to read the examples. But xsltproc was'nt able to find the appropriate DTDs and was fetching it from the internet. The trouble seemed to be of the catalog system but despite 3 hours of efforts, i was'nt able to debug it. Maybe it's because im too lame and stupid at DocBook/XML. Anyways, i emailed the deb packager (Mark Johnson) to checkout if the problem is not at his end.

Three days passed and I have'nt been able to work on GNU Robots :(

I did'nt slept the whole night and because of my commitment to jawwad could'nt sleep in the morning as well. Went with Jawwad to work on the final touches of the Bandwidth Manager but He got busy at his office and at about 13:30 i came back home as i could'nt miss the lunch and my class of "Linux System Admin." at 16:00. It was terribly hot today and the attendence of the student was expectedly low. I was really exhausted, not just because of the intense heat but also because of the lack of sleep. So i went straight to bed after the class (18:00).

Before the class i sent messages to Roohulameen telling him about his intellectual hypocrisy. He claims to be a true Marxist who truelly believe in the theories of Marx. He had been attacking my stance on Anarchism and his argument had always been that a society without an authority can't ever exist. But he does'nt at all object on the Marx' theory that such a society is the ultimate destiny of mankind. When he did'nt respond to my query, i sent him another message telling him that he should admit his crime or provide an explaination, but he did'nt respond. I finally sent him a message that I would'nt like to see his face again.

I woke up at 21:00 and could'nt sleep after that despite my efforts. Maybe i was too hungry. Anyway woke-up, had dinner, watched tv for a while and then studied for an hour or more for my 4 classes today ("Shell Scripting" and "Linux System Admin.")

Continued my work on gobject'ization of GNU Robots. Thanks to Mathrick (Maciej Katafiasz), who helped me to understand something i was quite confused on: Sharing of GTypes between the app. and plugins. I think I'll be able to finish the work on the robot module tonight. I'll work on the gobect'ization of plugins after this.

Woke up at about noon and then left for my class of "Linux System Admin.". It was damn hot today. Because of that and the weekend, the attendence of the students was quite low. But i taught them about Unix Permissions, how to change them, How to create backups (tar) etc.

Came to know of the fork of the GNOME project by oGo: GoneMI and after reading a little about it's aims, I thought it was a good idea. Mainly, because I like the idea of forking out projects as this creates a kind of accountibility for the developers of the original project. But when i told the goneMI people that I may help them on their IRC channel, mathrick and others guys on #gst told me the reality of Mr. oGo and also answered all his objections on the GNOME project. So i am not helping out Mr. oGo in his quest.

Tried gnome-ppp but did'nt like it, so many problems. But i think it'll improve a lot and I'll use it when it gets a little better. For the moment i'll be using my old friend: wvdial.

Learned some Bash and awk. Watched "The minority report" for a second time. Worked on GNU Robots a little...

Yesterday, I woke up quite late today (2 pm) and then rushed to the class. I taught them some commonly used Unix/Linux commands. Today, I'll be continueing that with permissions, backups and stuff like that.

After the class, i went to the gardeena (a cafe at the Peshawar Univ.) to meet Ayaz and Rooh-ul-Ameen (some of the very few people around, who commit the crime of thinking). Came back home at 9:30 pm.

I am quite fed up of pppconfig and i downloaded wvdial (which is what i've been using all the time before shifting to debian) and GNOME PPP. I'll try them as soon as i am finished with this entry.

Continued the efforts to make GNU Robots as OO as possible. One thing that I can't think-out is how to make the API module OO. I dont think that'll be possible without guile-gobject. But there does'nt seem to be any docs on guile-gobject, which is why I was trying to avoid it.

P.S Gstreamer guys, plz dont laugh at my ugly pic. as I dont have many pics around and I am not at all any good at gimp. :(

Woke up quite late (as usual) today, since i could really sleep early last night because of the severe headache. Then:

1. Took my class of "Linux System Admin.". Mostly repeated the material of the last two days and some new things like changing the permissions of files. But they needed to be taught Unix permission concepts first.

2. Back home, did some rest, had tea, watched TV for a while and finally had my dinner at 10 pm.

3. Tried some other Internet connections. pppconfig works in a quite strange Darwinian fasion: some times it works, sometimes it does'nt. All you can do is create, change and delete accounts again and again. Finally it would work and that is the instance, you should stop playing with pppconfig and let it be. After that you shall live the rest of your life happilly with pon/poff.

4. Hacked gnu-robots a bit. I could'nt understand what should be done in case of an error in the constructor of my [g]object. I tried the following:

   if (errors) { 
      g_object_unref (obj);
      return NULL;
   }

   While g_object_unref did'nt seem to be a prob. but returning a NULL caused the gobject-system to segfault. I've asked to help on this at the gtk+-devel list but for the moment i fixed the problem by having the errors var. inside the object struct and checking on it in my _new function.

This is the first time i am blogging, so dont mind if i do something wrong. Just tell me my mistake and I'll try to improve.. First of all, thanks to Zaheer for adding me to planet Gstreamer.

I woke up quite early today (5 am). Then:

1. Took my class of Shell-scrpiting from 11:30 to 13:15. Today i taught them the very basics (control chars, quoting etc etc).
2. Took my second class of "Linux System Admin." from 16:00 to 18:00. Did a sumarry of yesterday's lecture. It was an introduction to X and the Desktop Env. I dont know why the gov. guys love KDE so much (yuk).

I am quite tired now and i think i should go to sleep ASAP. Happy GNU Robots hacking tomorrow morning. :)