Advogato blog for brother

23 May 2001

Wed, 23 May 2001 10:15:07 GMT

Work:
Yesterday we had a kick-off meating for the technical side of the project I'm working half-time on the next few month. (The other half time is just ordinary maintaince work). We have to make some fundemental changes in the document model for our Content Manager.

An 8 hour meeeting is a lot tougher than normal work. It's posible to kind of relax when you are checking log-files and to some extend also when coding.

Life:
Last day of the week and then I have 4 days off work. I won't even touch my own computer. I'm going on a trip with the scouts and it seems we on't even need to bring a tent. But we better have a tent, otherwise it would start to rain.

Life is great.

19 May 2001

Sat, 19 May 2001 10:51:06 GMT

Today I have to write the review on Inside XML. It would be nice if I had time to let others read it beforemy deadline on monday.

Crazy idea I got no time for
JavaScript for Links (or lynx, but links is better). Start with SpiderMonkey from Mozilla. Then you just need to implement DOM-hooks.

15 May 2001

Tue, 15 May 2001 21:01:36 GMT

Been looking at Subversion. Looks like a very interesting project. I have yet to see it compile on my Debian box, but I'm working on it. (I know subversion isn't in a releaseable state, but I just have to play with it)

The first problem (other than making sure I got all the needed development packages) is that Debians BerkeleyDB version 3 should be linked with -ldb3 and not -ldb. With some hacking in ./configure I got it configured and could start the make process. Which failed still with linking problems with BerkeleyDB.

I thought this was the kind of problems autoconf was meant to solve without to much hacking for the programmer.

I know I shouldn't be hacking directly in ./configure. But I have absolutly no knowledge about the inner workings of autoconf. But now I know what the problems was I will try to solve it the right way.

I must convince someone in SSLUG to give a talk about auto{conf,make,...}.

btw: mozilla0.9 is quite good

9 May 2001

Wed, 9 May 2001 21:15:56 GMT

Been a long time...

Books

Sriram Srinivasan, Advanced Perl Programming. Great book. Many great hint I should have thought of myself. And chapter 20 on Perl Internals was quite informative.

Steven Holzner, Inside XML. Actually I'm rather disapointed. 1050 pages and the most interesting was the last 50 pages consisting of the XML 1.0 specifications. To much repetition and endless tables of attributes for XHTML tags and the alike.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan King of Apes. Well, we all know the story but it is nice to have read the real story. Not to bad but more as a picture of Burroughs and his time but not Africa and human evolution.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Return of Tarzan. Typical sequel. Can't recommend it.

Greg Bear, Foundation and Chaos. Don't read it. It sucks even more than Forward the Foundation.

Work

Nice job. Reinstalled our server, it was running Slackware and a lot of local build stuff. Now it's running Debian and only the backup scripts is localy made. Not so hard to maintain.

Hacking

HTML::Mason is nice. Easy to work with and very expresive. Other than redoing my hacking.dk site with mason I havn't really done anything not work related hacking the laste few months.

Life

no, just kidding.

23 Jan 2001

Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:40:35 GMT

I could just cut-n-paste wwwwolf's last entry except that I didn't wrote a hex dumping program last night. I probally just sat and read documentation for mod_perl.

12 Jan 2001

Fri, 12 Jan 2001 22:01:27 GMT

Work:
My computer wasn't up yet so I didn't do any real work. Watched an unattended install of Windows NT. Very entertaining, at some point there were no less than 4 error messages and no start button.

Talked with one from the company network department (who is responsible for the NT on my computer). Convinced him that C was invented for unix and C++ probally wasn't a Microsoft invention. (Wouldn't it be funny if he read this?)

Looking forward to install Debian on the Computer monday.

Hacking:
Does watching first episode of Star Trek Voyager (Caretaker, Part I) count? (Never really watched Star Trek before)

11 Jan 2001

Thu, 11 Jan 2001 19:53:36 GMT

Work

Yesterday was my first day at my new work. Nice place I think I will find my self quite good there. Only a handful of potential hackers but if they ain't my lusers I like talking with people (as long the know I'm the techie/hacker and I know what can be done!)

Of course they hadn't a machine ready for me, but it should be there tomorow. Yesterday I sat with TeraTerm connected to theirs linuxserver looking at their template/content system. It would be fun playing with.

One of my tasks will be putting together a XML information sharing system. Any must-reads about XML I need to read? (Other than the MS ones?) Any recomendable books I must buy? (Or let my new job buy for me)

The only downside is the Outlook calendar thingy. I guess Outlook would run in Wine or at least in WMWare?

Hacking
I finally got the time to hack a minimal first step in a ADiCT client toolkit together. Next thing is a coldsync conduite for putting events onto my palm.

3 Jan 2001

Wed, 3 Jan 2001 20:29:53 GMT

The hollidays is over and the flamewars on debian-devel has started. The first one is about wether we should encourage users to use testing/unstable. And of course we should (when they are able to read U N S T A B L E and what it means but that should only be a problem for Debian Jr.). And the other one is wether the maillists should munge the reply-to headers.

While the first one is interesting (for whom does we make debian) it is rather pointless to discuss, we havn't been able to agree in the past and we wont be able to agree now. Thats the beauty of working with 700+ volunteers. But the second flamewar is just stupid. Either way gnus handles both situations.

Anyone knows how to make dictionaries for Microsoft Office products?

29 Dec 2000

Fri, 29 Dec 2000 15:42:49 GMT

Spending New Year's Eve in the midle of Nowhere (aka. Sweden), sleeping in tent and cooking over a fire. Now I can say to my frinds at uni and in sslug that I actually have a <jargon article="Get a life">life</jargon>.

I forgot to change at lot of internal links on my homepage when I moved it to my own machine. The only relative links I had was the ones that couldn't be moved (like to other peoples homepages). It won't be changed this millenium

I should have listened more carefully when I had german in school. German is just a better language for philosopical thoughts. "Der Phantomsmertz des Selbst" sounds better than "Selvets fantomsmerter".

By the way: I have nothing against Sweden. There is just more nowhere there than we have in Denmark.

28 Dec 2000

Thu, 28 Dec 2000 16:04:58 GMT

It is quiet everywhere. Not many diaries her, SSLUG's maillists is almost dead (except some apache thread on -teknik) but most important not much flaming on the debian lists. People actually agree on something there.

The nice thing is that I'm not home a lot these days. I'm lining at my parrents house looking after it and my brother (or more like cooking for him and making sure that he doesn't play computer too much - the last is mostly because I using the computer)

So not much hacking done but I hope I will take the time to update my homepage (which I did a checkout off before I moved into my parrents house)

Wichert Akkerman is talking at LinuxForum2001 in Denmark. Hopefully he will talk about packaging tools and package formats or something like that. I'm looking forward to hearing him.

God jul og glædeligt nytår/årtusindeskifte eller hvad I nu fejre i øjeblikket.