Month: September 2000

25 Sep 2000 »

Netizen

I feel sad for Kirrily (Skud) to have her company go down the gurglers. That’s pretty damn shitty. I remember when Kirrily was running rainbow.net.au (IIRC) out of her garage in a northern Melbourne suburb. Well, at least it sounds as she’s going to have some fun somewhere else.

cla’s cats

Cats love keyboards. They are terrible typists, however. My advice is buy keyboards you can rip the keys off and suck out with a vacuum cleaner and put back in. My flatmate’s laptop went into a spin after Meebles slept on it yesterday. The fake numeric keypad had kicked in and wouldn’t go away. A reboot was required.

Hackery

Working on porting XFree86 4.0.1c to the NetBSD/alpha 1.5ALPHA2 snapshot. This has already occurred once, but I believe as a static server. I’m working on ensuring that 4.0.2 will have a decent X server for NetBSD/alpha where 99% of the things in x86 are present in the alpha port. DRI will take a bit longer; DRI is not ported to NetBSD yet.

14 Sep 2000 »

Today I conducted the largest single transaction I’ve ever done over the net – buying a new Dell Inspiron 4100 via the Dell web site.
So in a few weeks, I’ll have a nice shiny Dell sitting at home to replace my aging HP XU 6/200 dual PPro 200 and its busted 17″ monitor. The new box is fast with all the right bells and whistles – 800 MHz PIII, 32 MB GeForce2 GTS DDR, 12x DVD (I’m hoping its a model that is firmware upgradable), 128 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB 7200 RPM UltraATA 100 drive of some description. I chose not to get a wasted copy of Windows Me and instead went for Win2K as there was no Linux choice. Ripped off. Well, at least it didn’t cost the earth. In fact, it cost 27% of my HP’s cost (without cost adjustments for four years of CPI) for more than twice the processor speed. I had to get in before the Australian peso got much worse.

At least this time, the box is mostly standard. The HP has a HUGE motherboard which is probably as custom as you can get them.

I’m going to install a few operating systems on this new baby; RedHat and NetBSD and Win2K. It should be fun, especially as not every single device is yet supported.

14 Sep 2000 »

My Win2K box had conniptions this morning. Something had been in and munged a system file or two, and System File Protection was not having a bar of it (SFP is like tripwire on steroids). Frantic tearing around the house looking for 2195 installation media didn’t turn up my original holographic CD. I did find the 120 day limited trialware CD. SFP was happy with that and things worked okay… until I used Outlook, which quickly barfed.
ARGHHHHHH

I thought it might be a virus, but I’m one of the most cautious people I know. So I tried offloading all my files to Dan’s alpha, which already had Samba running on it. But softdep has this annoying habit of not immediately freeing space until the inode has been reused. So the disk was full when it wasn’t. I installed Samba onto blossom via pkgsrc (gee, it’s so hard doing this stuff: make install). The toughest part was getting a workable smb.conf in a hurry. So after a few run-ins with swat, I scp’d Dan’s and modified it to protect the guilty.

Bought a copy of NAV 2001 over the net from Symantec and installed it from their site. They get it – for a commercial vendor. Media is not needed in this day and age of fast cable connections.

Not a (known) virus.

The laptop is still a little flakey, and I don’t know what’s causing it. It’s probably up for its 3 mth re- install.

11 Sep 2000 »

Been meaning to post. Honest.
Been very very busy.

Went to Hobart to present the Win2K Security tutorial to what might have been a very hostile audience (it was run by the Australian Unix User’s Group- Tasmania and SAGE-Tas coordinator.) However, 33 people turned out, and they were cool. I’ll put the pictures up soon.

Did I mention that I bought myself a Canon Digital Ixus (aka Powershot S100 Elph in the US)? V. v. cool. So small and cute! It’s about 170 gms, and about the size and weight of 50 business cards sitting in a neat rectangular pile. Still 2.1 million pixels (1600×1200). V. impressive color and options. The supplied Windows 2000 software is way cool too – the USB just kicks ass!

Trying to get through the SAGE-AU exec stuff is a major drain on time. I have sponsors to look after, a newsletter to put out, etc, etc.

I have just been appointed as one of the technical geeks on the auDA DNS Competition Policy Panel (see http://www.auda.org.au for more info). This will drain even more of my spare time away. I have to fly to Canberra on September 27 for the kick off meeting. Should be fun at any rate.

hackery

Installed NetBSD-1.5/alpha ALPHA2 on my pc164. Sick of Linus and his stupid idiotic unbelievable mediocre software engineering (NOT!) decisions. No kernel debugger. No CVS tree. No proper integration of new and useful busses (such as PCMCIA or proper tie in for USB in a standard way). No modularization of code that is shared between different busses. Two distinct sound subsystems, with the superior one not integrated. Code freeze – heard of it, but doesn’t apply to some people. Regression testing? Happens to other operating systems. I’m sick of all that crap. I’m sure 2.4 will be enjoyed by many, but I think the 2.4 event horizon is showing Linus’s inadequacies more than ever before.

And now my cheapy FM801 sound card works just fine as the sound works without freezing the dang box. However, XFree86 doesn’t work as NetBSD treats 64 bit platforms as proper workstations, not just as a 8 bit PC grown up. So we have to add the 8 bit stuff back in (carefully) to allow inb() and outb() to initialize the card into MMIO mode so we can use 64 bit operations once more.

Just wish there were more *BSD developers and more sharing between the three major forks.