Older blog entries for dlc (starting at number 1)

I noticed that a slew of debian developers joined recently. I wonder what happened that they all took notice of Advogato at once?

First diary entry; I don't know what to say. I guess I'll just talk about what I've been doing at work, and use that as an introduction.

I spent a few weeks writing a Perl module to do threaded discussions, which runs as a subrequest under Apache/mod_perl with a mysql backend. It came together very well, under 1000 lines of code, including the web-based administration interface, all the templates (Template Toolkit), and more documentation that the code warrants. But the higher-ups decided against using it -- we're going to go with a separate product, made by another company that we happen to own, so now I have all this code, just waiting to be used. I am waiting for the go ahead to Open Source it; it's already been discussed, in passing, and is probably going to happen soon. Now all I need is a name for it...

I installed OpenBSD 2.7 for the first time the other day, on a Sparc 4. It went surprisingly well; I was expecting some difficulties, and had none. The problems arose after the install was completed, and the machine was up and running -- there are many fewer ports available for OpenBSD on sparc than there are for OpenBSD on other architecures. It ran quite well, despite its older processor. It does have 128 Megs of RAM, which I'm sure helped quite a bit. The only thing that was slow enough to worry me was the key generation on the initial boot.

Normally a lack of prepackaged applications wouldn't be a problem for me (I'm not afraid of my compiler), but the packages I wanted to install (vim 5.7, specifically) was giving me many problems (they looked like problems with the curses library, but I haven't followed up on them yet). I have yet to begin looking for the answer; with any luck, its a well-known one. Once I get it to compile, I'll see about contributing the port back to OpenBSD.

I've been neglecting my other projects, especially bashlib (a cgi library written in bash). My plans for the immediate future include doing an update to the bashlib code -- I want to add an API, rather than just make the user play with raw environment variables. Perhaps some HTML generation routines, in a separate source file.