Advogato blog for klevin

26 Mar 2002

Tue, 26 Mar 2002 07:10:45 GMT

We're all slaves to something/someone. The thing is, will you even make a choice? Most people are in denial, afraid to even think about it. Then you've got those who're chasing some elusive concept of "complete freedom." In the process, they become slaves to every new bit of freedom philosophy that comes along. "If only I do/have this, then I'll be free. If I resist here, then I'll be free." Problem is, they've become slaves to themselves, slaves to the quest for [pleasure|money|health|power|no strings|$(.*)^], and that's the harshest master around.

3 Mar 2002

Sun, 3 Mar 2002 08:06:58 GMT

Recert'd myself as an Apprentice. I don't feel that Journeyer is appropriate anymore. Haven't worked on the MPT Fusion driver for over a month and a half, and can't seem to bring myself to actually start coding on anything else (new or existing).

25 Feb 2002

Mon, 25 Feb 2002 22:27:36 GMT

SyntaxPolice: If dragging a folder just passes a directory handle, as opposed to a sorted list of files, that would explain the ordering issues. If I were a betting man (which I'm not), I'd bet the songs were getting played in order of creation/last modification when you drag a folder.

dmerrill: Not to worry. If some hoser snatches the linuxdoc.org domain, all that has to be done is to make it not worth his while to own it. One just has to make it more expensive than he/she/they can afford. ISP costs can become very high when a site is getting hammered with enough traffic to flood a few OC-3s.

Not too much to say about my end of things (whatever those things may be). Still job hunting. The game is scarce and the hunters are many.

Went to Barnes & Noble the other day. Noticed, for the first time in a long time, a copy of Fahrenheit 451 on the shelves that did not have to phrase "The temperature at which books burn" on the cover. Hallelujah! Almost bought it (I've been waiting a long time to get a new copy, just to avoid that bloody insult on the cover), but I don't have a whole lot of money and it came down to Fahrenheit 451 and a book of poetry by Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things. As I've read Fahrenheit 451 many times, but had never seen the Heaney book before, I'll have to wait a bit for Fahrenheit 451.

Right now, I'm reading Excession, by Iain M. Banks. As I've come to expect from Iain Banks, it's awesome (in many senses of the word). One of his many "Culture" novels.

17 Feb 2002

Sun, 17 Feb 2002 02:52:29 GMT

`Lo sralston, AKA Steve. Good to see you here on Advogato. One cert down, . . .

Got distracted from xmms yesterday when I noticed the "Invisible IRC Project" listed on the CodeCon website. v1 is pretty much "encrypted, hopefully anonymized, IRC." v2 (in development), is what I'm interested in. Sounds like some ideas I tossed around (bad follow through) for a distributed, encrypted, chat system. One thing that I ran into was how to avoid dupe sends of the same message between systems that are acting as servers. Obviously, don't send it to the system you got it from, but I was also thinking about using a 32bit CRC or md5sum for the message along with a TTL. The sum could be used both for error detection and by transmitting the sum ahead of the message, the receiving server can say "already got that." Next question is: for the average size of chat/irc messages, is the computation+transmission overhead of an additional checksum worth it?

16 Feb 2002

Sat, 16 Feb 2002 00:17:31 GMT

Been trying come up with an elegant, or, at least, not incredibly ugly, solution to the "problem" of how to take xmms playlist info and asynchronously push it out to a different system from within a xmms plugin. The initial solution (some months back) was to use xmms-infopipe and then run a bit of perl code every couple of minutes (via cron) that grabbed the xmms-infopipe output, munged it and then ssh'd it out to the remote location. Besides being ugly, that has the issue of running when there's no need to update, or, if the time interval is large enough, completely missing some sections of the playlist. I'd hoped to be able to find a "new song/track" notification in the xmms api but no such luck. That leaves a plugin that does polling.

Still trying to figure out why I'm getting large amounts of "popping" on cd's that I rip using my new system. If I turn around and rip them on the old system, no pops. It's either the cable running to the cd and dvd drives or the drives themselves. Don't think it's the drives, as I can rip from either drive and get the same result. Guess I'll have to buy a different SCSI-2 cable and see if that makes any difference.

11 Feb 2002

Mon, 11 Feb 2002 06:07:10 GMT

dyork: Give xrefer a whirl. Used to use www.m-w.com, but got annoyed when they started changing their interfaces around. xref is much more than just a dictionary, though it does that pretty well too.

Went to an engagement party for a friend tonight. Not entirely sure as to the wisdom of the the whole deal (think both of them are too young, emotionally), but it's their lives. Thing is, where we all come from, once the vows are taken, you can't just walk away if things don't turn out so well. Forever is a long time when you're not happy.

Haven't done much in the way of coding lately. Life is a really odd thing. I have a personal theory that the universe can be described as a fractal, with various places in the fractal corresponding to specific places and times. Choose a point and start zooming in. No matter how closely you look, there's always something more that can be seen by looking even more closely. Infinite detail in infinite combination. Huh, that last bit sound suspiciously like some philosophy espoused by the Vulcans from Star Trek. Time for the padded cell.

6 Feb 2002

Wed, 6 Feb 2002 04:25:57 GMT

It's all pretty much dead on my end. I think I need to get out of the house, as I'm finding that I've developed a tendancy to sleep till noon and still be exhausted by 8PM. No work yet. I'm thinking about taking some savings and going to Ireland with my brother (if he can scrounge up the money). Sceptre Ireland is running some rather interesting specials for travel through the end of March.

Noticed Alan Cox's comments about the mess that was I2O. I can truly sympathise. I spent far too much time sludging through the 400+ sheets of double-sided 8.5"x11" printout that made up the I2O specification. Fortunately, the company I worked for decided to ditch I2O (too much hassle, and the customers started developing nervous twitches when our sales people said "I2O"). Instead, we rolled our own company-wide wrapper for storage and network controllers. From the comments of several former co-workers who had been on the various I2O committees, I2O started out as something cool and then got bogged down in the committees. Design by committee rarely produces anything good, something that is all too easily forgotten.

29 Jan 2002

Tue, 29 Jan 2002 02:03:56 GMT

dayta: You're not alone in this complaint. One of my former co-workers used to whine at me about this every month or so (I was the defacto "Linux/Free Software/Open Source" person in the office and was thus considered an appropriate target). It seems he had had occasion to take a few swipes at the Linux IPv4 stack and a few bits of network related userland code while working on his Master's project, and had a bad experience with the almost complete lack of documentation and the use of cryptic variable/function names.

Considering that one of the main points of free software is that it is "open to many eyes," it seems to be a little off that so many of the prime examples of free software make little if any effort into making the code more understandable.

I, myself, had more than one occasion to grumble about the crypticness of the network stack while at my previous job.

24 Jan 2002

Thu, 24 Jan 2002 05:27:45 GMT

Went to day one of two days of an "outplacement services workshop" paid for by LSI. Not my usual cup of tea, but necessity makes for strange interests. First day consisted of talking about how everyone was feeling in regards to being RIF'd, doing "accomplishments" and strengths inventories, discussing a systematic method for networking (of the human to human variety, not computer<->computer) and some tips on what not to do w/ your resume. Interesting factoids: only 15% of the workforce gets jobs from responding to help wanted adds. The rest are found by talking to a friend of an associate's friend and so on. According to the fellow running the workshop, those stats change to 9%/91% for jobs in technical fields. This presents a difficulty for many in the workshop: either they haven't been around long enough to build much, if any, of a network (i.e. me and one of the other guys from my group that got axed) or they'd been w/ LSI (actually, NCR->ATT->Symbios->LSI, if you want to follow the trail of buyouts) for so long that most all of their contacts are stale. One of the guys was coming up on his 29th year and another hit 23 years the day he was laid off. Either way, it means a bit of extra work.

Tomorrow: more resume work.

So, for anyone who knows someone who could use a network server developer, Perl/CGI/DB person, Linux driver/network stack munger or just about anything else that involves C/C++, Perl or Korn work on a Unix/Linux OS, I can be reached at klevin@eskimo.com. Heck, I've got nothing against other languages (had briefer flings w/ Common LISP, Java, and CORBA via C bindings).

Anywho, time to hit the proverbial sidwalk and do some "networking."

21 Jan 2002

Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:18:40 GMT

chakie I too have a visceral aversion to the KKK. I believe the issue is that once you start silencing "extremist" groups, it becomes difficult to stop and the definition of what is "extremist" keeps geting wider and wider.

I've figured out what the "person" and "proj" tags do here on advogato, but still not sure on the "wiki" tag, so here's and experiment, wiki'ized "klevin": klevin.

Hmmm. Amusing, but I'm not sure of the utility. Perhaps that's because there's no entry for "klevin". I may have to remedy that.