Recent blog entries for digdude

Today I basically converted my Red Hat 8.0 machine from ext2 to xfs, and implemented devfs.

This took way longer than it should have.

Redhat is not very well setup to work with devfs, even with devfsd installed. Don't expect your mouse to work. Expect that somewhere in the boot-up scripts, redhat will try to rewrite your /etc/fstab file with new names (and then not write them back correctly if you use 'devfs=nomount' when you boot)

I had to use my LBT (bbc) disc 35 times today. That disc rocks. There are 2 show-stopper bugs in it. 'mount' doesn't work, (but 'mount.real' does) and 'losetup' is missing, so you can 'mount -o' something, but never release the /dev/loop0, so you can never reboot. :( These will have to be fixed soon! It still seems awesome to be able to use such a little linux disc for doing all this xfs conversion work.

Anyway, finally got the sequence all down, and after mkfs.xfs on a partition, you have to xfs_admin to set the label, since /etc/fstab uses partition labels for mounting. Grub is also very picky, and has to be re-installed for xfs support to work.

Whew.

Thursday and Friday of this week, I will be at the Open Source Health Care Alliance conference. ( http://www.openparadigms.com/oshca2002 ) If anyone is going to be there, let me know.

So, after years of using Debian, I am trying to learn the Red Hat way.

I still have all those machines at home happily running Debian, but the computer allocated for me at work has video chips and ethernet chips that are not in any of the stock installable debian kernels, or XFree packages, so I popped in the RedHat 8.0 CD here at work, and, voila, everything autodetected and is supported. I guess that's why RedHat's stuff has so many patches.

So, that and the fact that every other person here uses Redhat has made decide to better my RedHat skills and stick with this set-up for now.

So, first thing I noticed is how limiting Metacity is as a window manager. Yes, I've read all the gnome-devel lists about how confusing it is to operate a desktop, so that's why the gnome2 environment is so dumbed down. But, still... I can raise a window with a mouse click, but cannot lower it at all?

Metacity "lower" patches here. http://david.cdk.com/~dkaiser/metacity

soon and very soon I will be done with this unemployed thing...

more news tomorrow

yawn... that was fun,

I completely agree with bneely about Same-Gnome.

Total killer app.

I've lost the high score file from my old laptop, but I'm sure I hit a score of around 5600 at least once...

Spent most of the day on the phone, but got a lot accomplished. All in all it was good.

Talked to my friend Mac at the coffee shop. He was interested in Advogato, but he doesn't know how to use a computer, and we got to thinking: "How does Advogato and it's trust metric system apply to real life situations like peace treaties and such."

So, that got me thinking all the way home. "What if you could rank your neighbors as dimwits everytime their dog did a number to your lawn. " Or "Could I rank them as a Journeyer because they let me use their pool.

It dawns on me that ranking systems propably don't have as much real-life application.

So, now I'm stuck thinking about things like real-time ranking systems, or more correctly real-time evaluations in general. Like the 5-generals algorithm. If I recall correctly, the 5-generals were the 5 right hand men of Alexander the great (or was it Napoleon?) but whenever war-time strategy was being decided, they would all vote at once, then if all five votes didn't agree, they would force an election, to decide if the dissenting vote(s) were cast in sound mind.

The modern 5-generals algorithms are used in things like space shuttle operations and such. 5 or more computer systems running in parallel, all receive the same inputs, and all can issue the same outputs, but whenever one "decides" differently, ALL 5 vote as to whether the one is needing to be shut-down, including the one that is being voted on. I have never actually implemented it, but not having a complete fear of algorithms, I should go look at it sometime soon.
But, sometime when I'm not so tired. :)

Ok, off to bed. I'm starting to sound confused.

Spent the day over at anewsome's crib. DSL rules, it was like being in my own office.

Spent a major amount of time today developing a system for classifying and organizing various data of various datatypes and had to type up a requirements document to support it for a project at work. <yawn> I'm at least half-done.

in the background, grabbed a copy of OpenH323 from CVS, couldn't get it to build, since they're adding CallerID support, but it's not finished. So, I stepped back to the latest snapshot release, which built everything, except a couple functions were missing during the link. :( More later...

Spent a few happy moments chillin with anewsome and Queen Cathleen talking about her neighbors, social status, fighting over stupid things like who's kids beat up who's kids, etc..., housing committees, etc... made me want to move to the country.

Walked over to Quicknet today. Had a good conversation with Greg, Jonathan, and a consultant: Craig Southeren, who is one of the founders of the OpenH323 project.

OpenH323 looks pretty cool. Open source version of software that supports real standards. Standards in the true sense of the word. H323 is used in equipment/software from just about everyone!

Unfortunately, Asterisk, the pbx I had been working on has not had any real development to support H323, so I'll continue looking for better PBX software.

Tomorrow, I'm going to download and build the OpenH323 stack, should have some interesting technical tidbits then.

Last night found me pushing the low-end of the performance curve, my 486 DX2 / 50Mhz, with 20 Mb RAM. I attempted installation of the latest frozen Debian GNU/Linux. I(t) failed miserably due to hardware issues. I need to replace the IDE controller, among other things. ;) The poor thing's had nothing but DOS on it for so many years, maybe it's hopeless...

Checked out the latest Asterisk code, and got it built. I'm working on turning the 486 into a comm server, hosting my phone/v-mail/fax, etc... So far, I'm thinking I'll run a rather recent dev kernel, or 2.4 for sure when it's out, since they have the Quicknet PhoneJack driver in, but for now, I'm still downloading the latest one from Quicknet, who I'm going to see tomorrow. :) Is VoIP really the way of the future? We'll see.