Blog

18 Aug 2000 »

Not much happening.
My 17″ monitor is still dead. Long live the 17″ monitor.

11 Aug 2000 »

hackery
Not much happening – I want to work on a project management tool for KDE (I can’t wait for C++ wrappers for Gnome and/or much better IDL support that hides the C braindeath that passes for emulating C++ (badly)).

However, we got infected by a Java zealot as developer #3. Developer #1 wants to project manage. I’m developer #2. I don’t have time for this. Unfortunately, the Java Zealot is correct – most PM’s use Win32 and coding something for KDE or Gnome will knock them out of contention. However, my argument to that is very simple: MS Project 2000 is Very Very Very Good(tm) – it’s like version 10 and they’ve had over 10 years to get it right, and they did. If your daily rate is >$800 why skimp on a $400 tool?

life

Been invited to research, write, and present an in-depth Windows NT/2000 security tutorial for the Tasmanian Australian Unix User’s Group (AUUG), whose members missed out when the AusCERT-supplied speaker didn’t mention anything about NT when he was there in April.

This should be interesting. Most unix users take a very contrary view to Win32 security – you’ll be a rare Advogato reader if you are aware of the Win32 security model and actually like it. The audience will either be administrators resigned to working with NT/2000 or people interested in validating their (mostly wrong) views on NT/2000 security. A tough crowd in both cases. I hope that people will be able to take something away with them, even it is simply a greater appreciation for NT’s security model, which is actually quite decent when you get down and dirty with it. Very deep and fine grained once you accept the security model’s basic thrust, which is VMS-like and not Unix like.

27 Jul 2000 »

Opened my second SourceForge project today. I’m working on the secret project architecture. As soon as I have the High Level Architecture and Overview done, and as soon as the fantastic SF people approve my new project (pretty please!), I’ll post more details.
I’m going to undertake a social experiment with this project. The primary aim of the project is a bug free, high quality, CMM level 3 or 4 open-source project to replace an ancient but beloved tool on many Linux-like and Linux platforms. It will be architected to the nth degree before vi is opened or make invoked. By necessity, this requires a small or single person team to finish this part of the process before getting like-minded developers on to the job of actually cutting code. However, the process of developing the entire thing (besides the initial HLA) will be completely and utterly open in true bazaar style. I want to see if open source can produce a better tool when well known and well used software engineering practices are dolloped on top.

Software engineering best practice will be applied from woe to go to see if the defects in this tool, the MTBF and uptake are better than (say) fetchmail, which will be the reference project. I’ll write the experiment up for Linux Journal once 0.1 is released as source code to judge if it is a success. I’ll call the article “Post-bazaar software engineering” or something lame like that.

20 Jul 2000 »

Went to the Compaq GS series launch today. Big Iron. mmmm. 1-32 processors today, 1-48 processors soon. Kicks ass.
Made contact with Compaq Australia to try and get some eval kit to test multiple bus alpha boxes.

life

Watching Springer. A guy just grotted a nose booger on the show – without a hanky or anything. The audience don’t like him. Of course, he’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s roomy and some guy. Lots of bare breasts and beatings tonight too.

What a classy show. I love it. BLEEEEEP.

18 Jul 2000 »

Received some hate mail from lkml weenies after another of my semi-infamous I18N outbursts. What’s the problem with I18N that sends certain types scurrying for the lowest form of flamage?
To all those who sent me hate mail: FUCK YOU and grow up.

I’d like to see you grapple with your ASCII-only code and blinkered mindset if you spoke and wrote only Hindi or Arabic.

The fans are still annoyingly loud.

17 Jul 2000 »

This room is like being next to a small jet engine. Does anyone have a supply of ATX DC connectors and a 5 or 8 port 48 VDC output somewhere in Australia? I’m sick of all the damn fans. I have (count em!) 12 fans in four active PC’s. CPU fans, case fans. Back end fans because the case fans suck and cause the dang thing to overheat.

I need quiet fans, ones with low friction and noise bearings or preferably no fans. Fans fans fans ARRRRRGH

I need to lie down.

15 Jul 2000 »

After a typical day of waiting for delivery people (“It’ll be there between 7 am and midday” – the lady confirming my delivery the night before), my shiny new Sony Wega 68 cm TV arrived – at 1.10 pm. This delayed breakfast somewhat 🙁 We eventually got our eggs benedict avec salmon, mushies and tomato about 1.45 pm.
We watched the Matrix, of course (it’s my reference DVD), and then LA Confidential as a friend hadn’t seen it before. After dinner at Kentucky Fried Dog, we hired two movies, The Right Stuff (it’s sooo long), and US Marshalls (oldie but a goodie).

Hackery

I have a funny feeling that Linux’s “generals” do not use non-Intel platforms. They pumped out 2.4.0-test4 without testing on alpha again, even though there was a patch to fix the problem. I’ll chase it down again.

The 60’s show

I’m watching my new shiny TV set, and there’s a song by “Titan” or some similar bogus name, that could be straight out of the late 60’s or early 70’s. Don’t they realise that this time period, both musically and fashion wise sucked big time? The band even went to the ends of going low-tech and compressing the sound and it feels mono to me. What’s wrong with the idea of Saturday night being left to modern* techno/dance music?

* if it’s more than two weeks old, it’s passe.

13 Jul 2000 »

Bryce: please consider ISA and PCI pcmcia bridges for the Alpha. I have a ISA pcmcia bridge and if I can get my wavelan card working under the Alpha, that’d be great.
Geeking from the garden is the best!

Apparently the poll.h breakage was easily fixed by someone with a clue about osf_sys.c. After reading the real fix, it was “why didn’t I think of that?” with the immediate answer of “it was 1.30 am in the morning after being up for over 18 hours”.

13 Jul 2000 »

Working on being a temporary kernel hacker. Somebody ripped stuff out of poll.h without doing a full grep against the entire tree. A few compiles later, and my alpha is still not running 2.4.0-test4-pre6. Dunno. Might try a kernel without reiserfs support to see how that flies.
Spent a bit of time with Sun this morning whilst they went through their storage offerings. I want a FCAL card so I can beg borrow or steal a A3500 or A5200 or a T3 and make it work with reiserfs on my Alpha.

It’s 1.40 am and time for bed.

11 Jul 2000 »

(just a quickie)
Sergeant:

If I had Mr Brain engaged, and seen that Japanese (and the other locales) was selected as a package choice rather than just install everything in sight, it still wouldn’t have been a problem. I love doing that stuff and seeing how close I18N efforts have been. To a dedicated unilingualist, this might have been a re-install showstopper, but to me, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon. I’d like to see all of Linux kernel and all the packages that make up your typical distro to be translated to as many languages as possible.

I have all available languages configured on my Windows 2000 laptop, and I install them when I can on my Linux installs. I like to see what a native speaker will see when I view native language web sites and e-mail. I can’t read or write them, but it’s pretty hoopy.

Continuing my G4 story, I stumbled across the correct “fix” by happy co-incidence. I changed the locale back to C or something like that in a config file in /etc somewhere, and lo and behold, the next “su -” worked just fine. This was about a week ago, so no problems since then. The G4 kicks arse. It seriously feels fast doing stuff – certainly faster than my 500 MHz Alpha, even though the G4 is 50 MHz slower.

10 Jul 2000 »

Internationalization

??Andrew???

If you can read that (and if Advogato’s HTML filtering lets it through), then you’re doing remarkably well. If you can’t see the hiragana or Advogato filters it out (which it does), then it’s situation normal(afu) folks. When 70% of the planet does not speak English and over 50% would use non-roman character sets if they were able to read and write (a major problem in and of itself), ASCII is about as dead as last week’s undies.

Update: After posting it was obvious that Advogato is itself not I18N clean. I’ll work with Raph on an update (in my copious spare time!). As I’ve seen Danish and a couple of other languages on here, we should not discriminate against the double character set crowd.

I installed LinuxPPC on the Mac G4 at work (it wasn’t doing anything else) and accidentally went nuts installing everything. It installed Gnome with all the locales, and Japanese was the default system locale. It’s amazing how close some distributions are to localizing pretty much everywhere.

Detecting NT/2000

A previous diarist asked the question, how do I detect NT? If you’re writing in Perl (it looked like it), and you have access to the local environment variables (and I believe you do), then use the variable called “OS”. NT sets it to “Windows_NT”.

C:\>set

…

OS=Windows_NT

…