Older blog entries for kandalf (starting at number 5)

Ha! KDE did it again! someone thought over the problem with prelinking and the startup speed of KDE apps aside the current plan from the gcc people to make the ld linker optimize the apps and libs for dynamic linking. He posted a patch with a clear description how to apply it. It's actually not a patch, but a program that is to be run over the object files (*.o) after a make, then touch all object files and run make again to link libraries/applications. The speed improvement is *very* significant. As some people didn't have it handy on IRC, I just put that stuff on my webserver and added a link: http://kandalf.homeip.net. Just follow the link and read the file prelink which is a copy of the mail, and compile objprelink1.c.gz, which is an updated version that has been sent in later yesterday. I used it on my machine and it's *incredibly* fast now. It seems that in terms of speed, KDE apps will finally be able to compete with Microsoft apps under Windows, even though the graphics subsystem on UNIX is not inside the kernel :))

One thing that sucks about this diary is that the cursor moves a bit slowly. I really think moving this diary to my own webserver would be a good idea and just leaving the link here. Uhm...that requires cgi-scripting, right ? :) And a database to hold the contents, right ? :) Could you advogato people send me your cgi-scripts ? :))

Anyway, I tried ktexmaker2 yesterday with that LJ article. Noticed I didn't have latex installed on the laptop while I read over that article in the train. And I didn't have the listings which were on separate sites. Now I fixed that and I can finally start using latex a bit. I think I need to learn that anyway because I will need that for my thesis and that semester report that I have still open to write for Uni. It will be fun, definetly. I would really suggest taking ktexmaker into KDE and enhance it on several places. There could be templates and some of the very first, basic things mentioned in the tutorial from the LJ are missing in the menus. Auto-completion would be nice as well, so you get a popup for the available commands and you don't make so many errors that require you to fix them. Also, the output could be inside a terminal window inside the program, not in an external. Clicking on an error line would set the cursor there and so on. Eeek! Wait, that's what KDevelop does for programming! Couldn't someone just add a plugin for that stuff and write up some templates for all kinds of latex documents, say, book, article, report, slides and letter ? The locale could be asked for the paper format to set a default on that. Well, if noone else is up for it, my diary saves at least my ideas.

ah, a long day is over again. Time passes by quickly which is good for some parts, for others it isn't. I really would like to enjoy the good weather but it seems that life doesn't want me to do that since quite some years now :)

Had a good day yesterday with the KDE 3 announcement at www.pro-linux.de. Lots of people mailed they want to help on KDE programming and quality enhancement. Good result for one day of head-hunting.

Now, I actually thought about reading something about cgi-scripts and do my diary on my own webserver now :) That'd be fun. There's so many things that you can do with a server, it's amazing. Unfortunately you're never interested until it affects you and you have the possibility to do it right away in your own room, on your machine! /me is amazed :)

24 Jul 2001 (updated 24 Jul 2001 at 23:05 UTC) »

Well, day is over and I *need* to go to bed *now* :) Last night I stayed up way too long to answer that spanish mail from someone from columbia. I did it in spanish to see if I can manage to dig out some of the stuff I learned two years back by self-educating me, and I liked that a lot. If I would only remember as much about my exams when I have to write them, I'm saved :))

Done with re-reading the book for the exams, from tomorrow on only calculating...it is so damn boring this stuff...

Got my 4.3 BSD ISO burnt on CD. Started the installation, everything worked - except installing XFree 4.0.3 right away from the CD because it expects me to OK a security info on vt2 which can't be answered with any key ont he keyboard...I'll give it another try tomorrow or the other days this week, I'm really interested to get this thing up with a firewall, routing and stuff like the book that I keep since my FreeBSD 2.2.5 days and never made much use of since I only had a slow modem. Now is the time to faciliate the ports collection and the packages :))

Hmm...I should really buy a hub now with all these machines and only one monitor, crawling under the desk with my patch cable going from one machine to the other isn't that much fun about networking that it could be...

Hmm..I think I've found the error ! I just changed rcpppoed restart to rcpppoed start and it *should* work. We'll see how things are going after the next disconnect from the telecom. Learning has been well today, just the lunch was a bit heavy so I got *very* tired this afternoon over that stupid book. I hope I'll finish that tomorrow with the Kalman filter stuff and then calculate old exams.

My brother had a car accident. That's what happens to 18-year old's who try to get their cars to the limit you say. Well, everyone has to learn his lesson...glad nothing is hurt except damage on the car.

23 Jul 2001 (updated 23 Jul 2001 at 07:05 UTC) »

Moin !

Pretty exhausted after setting up my machine correctly with firewall, bind and apache. Though apache was the easiest to set up with SuSE :) DSL is really great stuff, though I encountered some weird machine hangs yesterday. And the reconnect script that stulle gave me doesn't seem to work - the ipchains module apparently still gets loaded though my firewall uses iptables and that is conflicting. The /var/log/warn log said something from /etc/ppp/ip-down so I edited that and removed all refereces to the suse personal-firewall starting. I'll reboot the machine before I now leave for my colleagues learning for my exam and see if I got disconnected tonight when I'm back.

Another idea that I thought would be useful is doing my mails over my machine alone and moving all my mailfolders there instead of keeping everything on the laptop. That requires a proper re-connect after t-online cuts the connection though....

Ah, and thanks to those that certified me as master :) That's a nice act so to speak, I appreciate you're all worshipping my feet :) Uhm...I should go and certify the others as well then...but I'll do that tonight, time to get ready now and leave.

Sigh. I join the crowd who spreads their sorrow on a little, lonesome diary on the net as well... :)

Now, after I got DSL yesterday and set up my main machine as a firewall and router, I'm actually a bit proud I got it managed - not that I didn't thought I was able to do it, but yet - I did it and success is always good for your self-esteem :)

One thing that bugs me though is that I can't close port 6000 for X on the main machine to the outside world but preserve it for my inner net. I *need* to have xdm show up from my laptop on the firewall machine where the monitor is...

Anyway, engough for today. Not much news anyway except those usual large commits on a sunday...we'll wait and see if those KHTML bugs go away soon :) At least, the webforms work again so I can post my diary entries :)

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