Older blog entries for kahlage (starting at number 20)

10:06:02 GMT+6 ==

I've got a new job! I'm no longer travelling the nation chasing robots. Nowadays, I'm doing more network-PC stuff. My exposure to Windows-based systems has increased, but that's what happens out here in the wilds of the IT industry.

braden's been doing some serious work on OpenVRML. I think I'm finally beginning to understand some of the profound architechture changes he's been focused on. It's a big project, but if you can wrap your brain around some of the code you'll learn some C++.

SGL finally crashed and burned, and I must admit that the final conflagration was Much more impressive than I thought it would be. It's lead developer kinda went nuts and tried to claim that his GPL'd code was his proprietary stuff. That was strange to see. Currently, I'm running Linux From Scratch. It was an educational transition. I don't think I could go back to a binary-based distro if I had to...

Now that I've been free of travel a while, the house is fixed up (now more leaks in the roof, painting, etc), my wife is happier, and I've begun decompressing from the mercenary robot-wrangling lifestyle. Yowsa! Things are much better than they were. I've even joined a local LUG. Spooky, innit?

I'll try and post more to this site. It's nice to have a venue that's passively attentive. Pax --

Sorcerer GNU/Linux is growing. The innovative idea of using only source-code to install a Linux distribution has caught on; the recent reviews and Slashdotting didn't hurt either. Kyle Sallee, the original author of the sorcery package management system and founder of SGL, is being overworked. Bizaare people have joined the mailinglists and development teams.

I fear the center cannot hold.

I really like the distribution, and I feel Kyle should be rewarded for his coding, originality, and endless ability to put up with goofball questions on the 'lists. I also think my involvement in SGL is about to wane

My other Free Software projects are suffering, and I'm not getting any further understanding the Savannah mutant of the SourceForge web development system. So I'll be working toward freeing my time from SGL development to focus on other projects.

braden has an Advogato page, and he's started using it! Cool! I wonder how much time he's got to put towards Semblance? I wonder how these tags work? I wonder when I'll get thru with this bloody C5 upgrade and be allowed to do some original work again?

I'll jabber more later--

12:02:21 GMT +5 ==

schoen: Thanks for noticing my horrible spelling skills! I was pulling that quote from the back of my head, and I think my terrific (as in 'invoking terror') Texan drawl got in the way. (People outside Texas often tell me I sound like Yosimite Sam from Looney Tunes.)

Good to see someone is reading my posts... Cool BLOG -- Congrats on your new job. I hope things go well.

Any advise for putting a book collection online? Good collection, too BTW...

For anyone else out there who enjoys the sound of Latin as much as I do (minus the drawl) it's actually:

possunt quia posse videntur

18:46:42 GMT+5 ==

Hello? Is there anyone on the automake mailing list that actually cares to answer bug reports? The effort I've made to get Michael Louka's dxf2vrml program running with a ./configure script wasn't nearly as difficult as getting anyone on the automake mailinglist to respond to the strange behavior I'm seeing on GNU Darwin systems...

If noone knows or cares, that's great -- just say so! I know my email is working. I know I'm not getting my messages bounced back to me. I also know I'm not getting any response. I don't grok Perl, and I've tried to understand the appropriate sections of code. This is frustrating.

Southwestern Bell Internet Services uses automated email responses. Be warned. Sometime during my last trip into the wilds of North Carolina, my news server access went away. Which bites. I sent support@scbglobal.net a nice email asking which news server I should tag for my usenet feed. I got back a cut-and-pasted response about restarting Microsoft Outlook. GNU Emacs / Gnus doesn't have the problems listed in the email... (I wouldn't use them if they did.)

On the upside, I'm home again. The robot I was sent to get going is happily stacking boxes. I've recently started looking at finishing my application of the RuneQuest role-playing rules to the Traveller science fiction universe. I just might start gaming again after a 6 year sabbatical. This could be fun--

Poussant quia posse videnture.
They can because they think they can
-- Vergil

Anyone reading this should know; I am a US citizen who lives in Texas. The recent terrorist activity has affected me quite deeply and I'm still figuring out what to feel about it. Complicating matters, I have relatives who are Iranian and people are throwing crap at his house because of his ethnicity.

I can't educate everyone about the political situation in the Middle East, simply because I'm ignorant to a large degree myself. However, down here in the Bible Belt it seems to be alright to turn on your bigotry when horrible things happen. (Or alternately, when your football team looses, or you've taken another breath, etc...) I find myself short-tempered when dealing with the public. I feel the urge to yell about their stupidity to them, or just avoid them altogether. I think the later is my best course of action, and it will be what I pursue until I sort my own emotional state out.

Now, on to other things!

Sorcerer GNU/Linux has turned out to be really cool. I wasn't getting it to boot after the installation because the creator has reservations about having his distro over-write the boot sector of the harddrive it's installed on. Whether this is a personal fetish or a serious concern of releasing a new distribution onto your hardware I haven't figured out yet... But once I understood this, it was a simple matter to edit /etc/lilo.conf and make it boot the correct way. Sorcerer has some serious features that other distros don't (including my precious Slackware), to whit:

• automatic dependancy tracking
• automatic dependancy recovery -- just type cast --fix
• automatic package installation -- if you call a program that doesn't already exist on the box, it will find, download, compile, install, and run it for you. You can turn this off, if you like.
• all software is optimized for your hardware

It's really quite pretty. It uses SysV init scripts, but that's alright. They're not too hard to tinker with. I'd recommend anyone who's had a little experience to tinker with it. It's a kicker distro that's quite powerful.

In other news, I've begun helping Michael Louka (of MacWeb3D and VRML on the Macintosh fame) with a new program. His dxf2vrml convertor is pretty cool, but my autoconf / automake scripts are leaving a little to be desired. Why does GNU Darwin and IRIX want the linker flags at the end of the commandline? I need to buy the Goat Book...

Well, I have to go to work. Robots aren't behaving and the deadlines are drawing ever nearer.

<dexter-voice intensity=100%>Stupid robots!</dexter-voice>

20:56 GMT+5 ==

Well, Suz and I aren't going to Alabama this weekend. The weather between here and there is completely horrible, so we're going to ride out my week of vacation here at home. This should be good...

I installed all the patches to make my system a linux-2.4.10-pre2 kernel with all the ReiserFS stuff supported natively. I've added a reiserfs partition, and started using it. Seems pretty cool. I've been interested in a journalling filesystem for a while, but this is the first I've tinkered with.

Sorcerer GNU/Linux still looks sexy, but it's not installed yet. It seems the Frankenstinian beast I call a computer has some strange hardware requirements. We shall persevere! I'm burning a new ISO for Sorcerer to CD-R right now. The previous version's install went well until init tried to do it's thing. Then things got funky -- I'll let you know how a fresh ISO performs. The new one is sorcerer-20010830.iso.bz2, for those who must know.

Pax Omnium Veritas--

15:15:26 GMT+5 ==

There's a SouthEast Texas Linux Users Group!

http://www.setxlug.org

Mage, the wierdo, didn't deign to tell me about it, except in passing. (Okay -- he was moving his family into a new house -- his excuse holds!)

Once there, I find a growing number of people in this area doing stuff with Linux and kin. It's great. I've been interested in hearing what the members have to say about Package Managers. There might be something new to do here.

I found Sorcerer GNU/Linux, and it looks really good.

http://sorcerer.wox.org

I'll be nuking my GNU Hurd disk to try it out. Hurd was pretty cool, but they're still waayyy beta yet. No 3D goodness to be had. :(

Sorcerer is a source-code based distro of Linux. *Everything* is compiled from source for your install... Is that sexy or what?

11:04am GMT+6 ==

I'm finally back from that trip for work. I've never experienced anything quite like this! Being held in one place for so long against my will... That must be what prison is like without the fast food.

gtklookat development has stabilized into a working tarball for the new openvrml library.

xmlookat faces some challenges WRT the library stuff in autoconf / automake.

I'm using GNU Emacs for *everything* nowadays. Development, news, mail, webrowsing, an alarm clock, text file conversions (viator will not be publicly released -- use Emacs!), all my crypto stuff. Bang! It rocks. As a result, I'm beginning to tinker with more LISP. Scary...

More later, I have to finish our taxes. (Wife has some complicated IRAs...)

Pax Omnium Veritas--

9:21am GMT+6 ==

• gtklookat: updated and tarball rolled.
• xmlookat: updated, but the autoconf/m4 macros to detect Lesstif don't seem to wash. Downloaded Goat Book and am reading...
• viator: texinfo is powerful! I had no idea.

Packing for the next trip out. Erie, PA here I come. I'm hoping there'll be a dialup I can squeeze 19200 baud out of. Mail is piling up.

4:24pm GMT+6 ==

OpenVRML: finally getting to apply tflynn's patch and get xmlookat working. Quite cool...

The new laptop is great. I had to install Lesstif to get xmlookat working. This is only a concern because its HDD is getting full.

Leaving Sunday morning (01/14) for Erie, PA US. It's going to be f**king COLD compared to where I'm currently at in meatspace... Wish me luck.

viator: Got automake to build a Makefile and binary. Now to learn texinfo for the info page... Needs a man page, too. I hate man pages. ^g-