• Feature finished Kralle, the rallye tool built from Ralfs rallye tool. Python is pretty neat, but boring, so boring. Anyway, the whole thing works, I'll clean up the code when I'll have some time.
• Cleaned up the z80 assembler, as the zilog specification had quite a lot of errors in it.
• The Karlsruhe CSIDC team is among the top ten, very nice, but also lots of work. Spent time writing some code and slides for the presentation in Washington in 2 weeks.
• We have new rooms for the entropia e.V. here, which I quickly filled up with bunch of old hardware. Among others, my VAX tower, now featuring 11 machines, and a neat pdp11/03. Unfortunately, the QBUS serial interface card seems to be missing, so I could not boot it for now.

Mulad: I had to fiddle with backup solutions twice lately. I first thought using amanda would be perfect, but it turned out to be overkill, as in one case only one machine had to be backed up, in the other case, 2 redundant servers. We use amanda at our student house, with ~ 15 machines, and it is just fine, but for small networks, it is too complicated. I then got the hostdump.sh script from somewhere on the net, patched a few errors it had, but got disappointed by it, as it is tremendously long and complicated and ugly. However, it writes a label file using tar as the first file on the tape. It also writes an index file last. I used the same idea, in one case using the label file only to ask the user if the tape is the correct one, in the other case to parse the file list, and play them back correctly. In one case (the redundant case), I use a simple spool directory, where Tar files get periodically written to, and backed up to tape once a day. A full dump is done each weekend. I also write small ksh scripts so lusers could back up data without destroying the oracle databases and stuff. Hope that helps, I could mail you some scripts, but I don't want to release them, they are just too ludicrous. Sorry for my bad english.

hacking: Wrote a z80 assembler in LISP, to get a better grasp of the language. I must say, macros rule :) Actually, it is a 1 1/2 pass table/function based assembler. I'll add a few architectures (6502 and stuff) and release it.

Wormhole: Well, we have almost finished. Today/tomorrow is CSIDC deadline, let's see...

Misc.: Vaxpower today, hmmm.....

Work: Kind of designed an overall view of the telex system, waiting to know if the main programmers are willing to do something with it. It can be quite intimidating when you are young and fresh :). Finally got the damn DAT to work in the compaq server, which quickly vanished into the depth of Opel afterwards. I hope everything works right, I almost got no time to test the server in the (long) run (more than a few days).

Wormhole: We pretty finished our paper about BTRC, it rocks :).

Klosterrallye: Rewrote my set of gimp scripts, which were slow, crappy (SIOD gets on my nerves, can't they at least use some decent scheme interpreter) and big, to make a nice little binary producing html with bigloo. The html is then converted to ps with netscape (geesshh!), html2ps produces nonusable output.

Entropia: The talk about GSM was very interesting, with a good flow and a nice set of slides. The talking and hardware stuff afterwards was quite fun too. And most important of all, I heard we finally got the flat in the Gewerbehof. This rocks, I'm gonna move all the Vaxen there so I'll have a bit more room here.

Hadiko: I got some stuff done, mostly emailing users about potential problems they could/would have or already have (moving out, wrong email adress, "selbstverwaltungs"-aliase), finished patching mirror, some scripts and adzapper so they would work nicely in our setup (mirror to use a ftp proxy, adzapper to forward ftp and https).

Hacking: Quite intensively learned LISP, which really rocks. I appreciate all this integrated development environment stuff, and may even try to learn emacs again :). I also began to code some CLOS classes for my MUA, and wrote down some ideas. I went to the university library today, and spent almost a whole hour just looking at some book titles. There is so much interesting stuff out there, so much to learn, so much systems I won't possibly ever be able to try (system 360 for example, or RSX, or system programming on the VAX 11). This is sometimes frustrating. Nevertheless, got myself a book about CLOS and MOP, and a book about software engineering, testing, documentation. I really want to be able to produce nice, industrial code :).

Life: Moving to my girlfriend's for the 1st of May. This is gonna be nice.

Work: Set up the new server, and wrote a whole lot of documentation. Getting oracle, Compaq server management agents (ph34r), and hostdump to work under SuSE was a bit of a challenge, I never used anything else than Debian.

Wormhole: I rewrote the BTRC design specification, but it still isn't enough. I'll try to make everything right tonight, and also write the wormhole design specification anew, as the design of the server has quite changed. In a few days, I'll be able to tell what wormhole is :)

Klosterrallye: Finished the webpages, Latte is really a nice tool.

PIC: Started building a whole lot of PIC programmers in order to do a workshop at entropia. It'll be quite fun I think. Also, if everybody has his own PIC, I think we'll be starting to see interesting things in the next months :).

Life: I'm not at all satisfied lately, I think it's because I try to do too much things at once and can't achieve one correctly.

Hadiko: I quit my "Dienste Tutoriat" at the HaDiKo, and am only a "Helfer" now. I hope to set up the newsserver in the next days, so we'll be able to order the satellite solution and get a real weather independent feed :)