Older blog entries for DarkBlack (starting at number 6)

Well, I have finally gotten new parts for my desktop system. A new ASUS P3V4X Board, 128M RAM, PIII 733, and a Voodoo5.

It definitely is not the same computer as it once was. New Hard drive is on it's way.

Pulled out my old Metallica CD's and have been into that for some strange reason. Maybe it's that I am feeling old a little before I think that I should.

I'm currently debating on names for the school student management software. Hopefully something will stike me soon.

I've been away for a while. I've been away from the Net for a while at that.

School is back in session and dealing with the sheer volume of work has been a task in and of itself. However, the weekend provided me with time for reflection and time to relax.

To begin my shock of coming back on to the Net after a few days, I am very happy to hear that Qt is now available under the GPL. While I am normally a GNOME user, I am currently testing out KDE under Debian. I will be happy to finally get KDE from "Official" sources. Ivan has done a wonderful job of keeping builds up to date.

Well, as a revisit to the Linux in Schools article a few days back, I have joined the SEUL/edu mailing list and have been discussing the possibility of starting a full blown student management/scheduling/attendace suite.

Most of my X programming has been done via GTK+/GNOME. With the size of this new project encompassing an entire school district, it will need cross-platform compatibility. This alone will complicate things alot. I have been looking, now that Qt is GPL, at building the application with it.

I am very impressed with the new KDE. That just shows how impressed that I am. It's quick. It's still a little quirky, but hey, it's a beta. It's very good for a beta.

Well, back to work.

26 Jul 2000 (updated 21 Jul 2013 at 20:58 UTC) »

Well, It's coming together finally. I spent most of the
weekend painting and cleaning. My bedroom ceiling and walls
have been painted and the carpet has been cleaned.

I have been cleaning up the HD of my desktop system by
moving important but usually unaltered info onto Zip Disks.
Speaking of the desktop, it's definitely time to consider a
new motherboard, processor and memory. Everything else can
wait for a little longer. The P200 has just about had it.

I have recently picked up an interest in the SEUL/EDU project. I may
be starting a project aimed at school accounting. I
have found that most software designed for use in a school
system is mostly crap. You would not believe the crap that
is sold for thousands of dollars to school systems every
where.

For example, the accounting software that we currently have
was coded in Microsoft FoxPro and has the most horrible interface.
The app can crash very easily because the code has
hard-coded window positions. So if you set your resolution
to 800x600 on some machines the app crashes with an error
stating that the window would be off the screen. The whole
program looks like it was thrown together in a couple day's
time. It's really that bad.

Well, I am going to end it there for now. I will continue
this later.

I have been reading Geeks by Jon Katz. I have not been a big fan of Katz in the past, but I have really enjoyed this book. It is so easy to get absorbed by the lives of the two geeks and relate their experiences to my own.

I will go back and re-read some of his articles on Slashdot and think about them more closely.

As a side note, the decision has come down that we will be replacing our Netware 5 servers with Linux/Samba servers the next time around. Our Netware Admin is fed up with the horrible problems in upgrading our Netware 4.11 servers to version 5.

I personally like the way NDS works. I really think that Novell should really consider opening up the source for NDS. I will be a little sad to see it go. However, Admining Linux boxen via ssh should be no problem. I would actually prefer that method.

Worked today on setting up a socks5 proxy on a Solaris machine. This box was purchased as a turn-key system, but they really don't know how to set it up! Tools were in an obscure directory - not in /usr/local.

Definitely going to have to put some GNU tools on this thing and straighten up that directory structure. The socks5 server would not compile on the darned thing!

In the user land today, some lady tried to switch two computers who were sharing printers and couldn't understand why she couldn't print to any of the printers anymore!

*sigh*

23 Jul 2000 (updated 21 Jul 2013 at 20:59 UTC) »

Tried using several GNOME Applications in LANG=fr_FR today.
I noticed that there are a lot of phrases that can't be
translated easily into french or probably many other
languages either. Mental not to self: Make sure to write
easily translatable strings.

Today I am reading through the balsa source code and bug hunting.

Did homework for class

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