Older blog entries for blm (starting at number 10)

I am still having trouble finding people that will accept me into their project. At the moment I am just getting ignored. I need to do stuff to get people to take me seriously.

Oh and I am officially boring as my diary rating is stuck at 3.6 :-(

I am downloading and isntalling Gnome2 CVS and Mono to see if I can do anything on those. Mono is good as it has prominent todo lists.

It seems that someone (Sorry Glynn) left a html tag open ( <center>) that caused things to be centered for the rest of the diary entries in planet.gnome.org. I wonder whether an open <!-- comment at the end of someone elses blog entry would blank out other entries. Maybe somone should look at that? I suppose only trusted people are added to planet blog sites.

I always knew brilliant people hung around here:

Janurary 2003 Maths genius Bram Cohen creates BitTorrent

"Inside the Kazaa Raid" Australian Personal Computer May 2004

thomasvs,

I think it was you asking if there was a tool that could allow you to work on anaconda keeping track of your changes and allow you to easily incorporate changes from redhat as well. Xouvert seem to have the same problem working on a codebase derived from XFree86. They seem to think that arch will allow them to work with both the XFree86 and their codebase simultaneously and easily. I haven't tried it yet but I hope to soon.

Coding

A while ago it was suggested that a rss feed for advogato's recentlog would be of value by dyork (I believe or was it a mozilla sidebar). Since it was not possible to put apache-dev on my server and look into adding it to mod_virgule I whipped up a perl script to download the recentlog.html, break it up into diary entries and store in a sql database. That bit seemed to work fine. However when using php to spit out the diary entries in rss form the resultant rss would not validate :-(. Something to do with unbalanced tags in diary entries. Then it looked like the server that I was hosting my site on with this project on it was going to disappear I had to take it down. When exams are over and if there seems to be interest I will put it up so others may use what I've done if it is of value or maybe people could help me understand exactly what is not quite right with the rss.xml

Other stuff

daniels: I hear you. There seems to be a lot of contradiction in current government policy's and actions. I work for a secondary school and am a university student (mature age). They seems to be spending all kinds of money on improving something called retention which is the percent of high school students that go onto further education. But at the same time the federal government seems hell bent on increasing the amount of money that students will have to pay upfront. This would seemingly harm retention rates.

I will never forget the interview with the treasurer in which the interviewer highlighted the fact that he didn't have to pay upfront for his degree.

I still don't know how to add my position within a project :-(. Do you do this:

<p>This person is:</p>
<p>
<li>a Helper on project <proj>Life</proj></li>
</p>

which is what I call the "by hand" approach or is there a shorter notation? For instance

<PROJ position="helper">Life</PROJ>

Tonight I have borrowed a laptop from work. I type this whilst sitting at the laundrette while my clothes wash. I love it and want my own laptop asap. I wouldn't mind to much if for monetary reasons it has to be bottom of the range. I am seriously looking at the cheapest iBook. I can get since I have a crush on apple kit (but not their price.)

The i in iMac is not for inferior ;-)

Today I blew away my OS X partition to put debianppc back on my iMac. I like OSX (like crystal clear text on display) but there are things that annoy me about it (the list goes on) So after seeing screenshots of Gnome2 I thought that I would give that a go. I am a Enlightenment user from way back but we will see (sorry raster) The install is going well but the scrollkeeper install takes forever. But all-in-all linux on my machine is much snappier then OSX (Is it pronounced like os sex?)

Thanks go to Hadess for the debs and the entire GNOME crew for Gnome2. I hope I will be able to contribute. The GNOME websites with the list of tasks will probably make it easier

[sidenote: To get linux to boot u neet a small bootstrap partition to be ``blessed''. I guess This contains necessary stuff to load the kernel. I just noticed that when it does this it says

Blessing /dev/hda2 with Holy Penguin Pee...

I nearly wet myself laughing]

Me and Perl and a dog named Blue

I have been mainly doing programming in Perl recently. I fear releasing stuff for public consumption. Apart from licensing issues I am worried about what others will think of me when they see my code. Soon though it may be all right. I am getting more used to $_ and @_ usage so my code looks cleaner (at least to me).

linux.conf.au

I really want to go to linux.conf.au. When I found out about the extension in time for paper submissions I had a zany idea to present my secret project number 1. It is like a new distribution but not. There are already too many distros out there so I will make mine a custom install of (probably) redhat or (maybe) debian. It will be the one out of these two that where you can specify scripts to pick the packages to be installed.

Alas two weeks is not enough time to prepare a submission and I don't have the hardware to complete it since I would need a seperate test computer. Maybe I will go as a spectator?

Cg

Nymia: I only recently found out about Cg. It seems to be an effort to take some complexity away from the graphics developers in an effort to make things easier. I am all for making life easier but is this approach like taking pointers away from languages since so many people beleive that Programmers don't know how to program safely when dealing with raw memory locations through pointers. I personally hate it when people forget to learn how to do things right and rely on others to take away all the complexity for them.

Alas I am not a graphics programmer so it may well be out of the realm of stuff I should talk about. Also I have no wish to start any heated discussions. I myself have be known to take thee path of using interpreted perl over writing a small C module.

I note also that you say

Now, if they can setup something for non-windows platform, that would definitely get things moving.

I read somewhere that the Cg language came out of a partnership between nvidia and microsoft and a subset will be included with DirectX 9. However, there was an indication that there is a superset for use with OpenGL and useful on other platforms like MacOS. Lets hope that it is available for the FreeBSD's and Linux's of the world. Certification

Alas when I post a diary it still says I am an observer even though two people have certified me as an apprentice. It must be a funky trust metric thing..

OK so I rewrote the pipe reader to ignore end of file marker and just keep reading. The stability of squid (writing to the pipe) and my reader seems much, much better I also use nohup(1) but most of the time it seems unnecessary.

I had a go at daemonizing the reader in the process of getting it more stable but none of the statements after the fork got executed. I can't understand why my test program worked but this one didn't. The fork() seemed to work ok.

Anyway I have left that to move onto more pressing matter: Performance. The system is a proxy which tracks downloads making people pay per megabyte. When they run out of credit they can't download. As a sideline the system does censorship[1] of www content. Now the problem is that when losts of people start browsing the web the load avg goes to ~20 and everything slows to a crawl. The Mysql daemon chews lots of CPU. So I am working on caching the information and making sure that the tables are designed properly with proper indexes and keys.

Can someone please certify me :-) I am slightly more then an observer but just less then an apprentice

[1] I know, I know. You hate censorship. So do I! But I have a legal responsiblity to sheild minors using my system from that which is deemed socially acceptable as best as possible.

I am working on this GPL program for a client and am having difficulties.

I think I am right in my conclusion that programs started with the ampersand are started in the background but still tied to the controlling tty so if my ssh connection dies so does the program. When I don't want this I have to create a daemon.

I am trying to create a program to read from a named pipe created using

mknod pipename p

that blocks till there is data to come through from the "writer" process. The "writer" keeps restarting killing my "reader" process. So I guess I have to poll ? I don't know..

I really need that book on UNIX System Programming that was written by W. Richard Stevens (I think....)(God rest his soul)

More research needed....