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.
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