Older blog entries for mascot (starting at number 23)

Shrinking Debian

I'm getting there... I've used 180Mb, and I now have X, Metacity, a couple of program launchers, and a couple of 3270 (IBM mainframe) clients. Still no browser, though, and 30Mb left to work with. The browser will probably be Opera or Phoenix. (Not Galeon; no room for all the Gnome stuff it needs!)

gene

Further artwork for the Gene website today... a brand new logo should appear there any day now :-) A big improvement over my incredibly tacky temporary logo.

dialog and whiptail

Thanks to Stevey for volunteering to have a look into the fault I mentioned yesterday.

Shrinking Debian

I tried Debian for the first time today (what took me so long, I wonder?). Not as my main distro for my PC - I remain firmly attached to Gentoo - but on an ancient machine I'm trying to set up as a sort of thin client containing only an X server, a web browser, and x3270. This is a demo of something that might end up replacing a load of dumb terminals at my Dad's work, since they're changing e-mail system from a mainframe-based one to a web-based one.

My mission is to create a Linux installation with the above-mentioned features, on the lowest-spec machine possible. I'm starting out with a 486 DX/2 50 MHz machine with 24 Mb of RAM and a 255 Mb hard disk (this was my first computer, incidentally, but upgraded from its original 25 MHz / 4 Mb / 129 Mb configuration!).

The main barrier at the moment is disk space. The Debian base system takes up half of my 215 Mb data partition - and that's without X etc. I'm still trying to get the absolute bare minimum of packages, but I may have to end up swapping disks. I'm thinking about using the e2compr disk compression patch, but I think that might be terrible on a 50 MHz machine....

dialog and whiptail

A gripe about an annoying bug in these two programs.

Firstly, some background info: these programs display dialog boxes in text mode, from shell scripts. They have a number of modes of operation, e.g. a yes/no box, a message box, an input box, etc. And an "info box" - which is different in that it's supposed to draw the dialog on the screen and then exit immediately, leaving the dialog on the screen, but allowing the shell script to continue executing and to display another dialog when it is ready. E.g. an infobox could be used for a "please wait" message.

But the infobox mode only works when TERM="linux", i.e. on text consoles. If you try and run it in xterm etc, then no dialog appears, just a blank screen. (I suspect that actually the dialog is drawn, but the screen is blanked on exit, i.e. immediately afterwards!) This is annoying, and I can't find a way around it.

If anyone knows a workaround, or an alternative dialog program which has the feature I need but doesn't suffer from this problem, then please tell me. Thanks.

Mailing lists or forums?

Further work on the MyAddressBook website today. The current dilemma is this: to use mailing lists, or to use forums? From the end-user's point of view, mailing lists are obviously better for quick responses (not many people will check the forum regularly), but mailing lists are much more fiddly than forums if you just want to ask one question.

The ideal solution - which SourceForge claims to do, but it doesn't appear to work - is a combination of mailing list and forum. I.e. an archive interface to a mailing list which you can also post from. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be achievable, since although the text says you can post, there is no Post button! (I've filed a support request on SF to try and get this resolved.)

So it looks like I'll have to settle for one or the other (since having separate lists and forums would be very confusing). But which one?

24 Sep 2002 (updated 24 Sep 2002 at 20:57 UTC) »

Yesterday

I didn't submit a diary entry yesterday, because I went to London for the day with school (me, a few friends, and our form teacher) to visit the Science Museum, the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution, and to listen to a lecture (entitled "Mathematics, Magic, and the Electric Guitar") at the Royal Society. And we saw the original Newton's Principia - scary to think how many problems in maths this one book had caused us :-) Great fun, but I got back very late and very tired. London is exhausting...

Today

Today was almost as hectic - it was the school's "Founders Day", which meant transporting two-thirds of the school (probably about 700 pupils) across Bradford. And since I'm a prefect, I got the privelige of carrying lots of chairs, and managing the scrum of 700 people all trying to crowd into a corner to try and find their bags at the end... :-P

Grr. Perhaps I'll have time for something interesting tomorrow. Homework just stacks up...

Yet another important addendum...

Now, the Advogato Virus guy (tttt) has found a way to forge certifications. He used a few accounts, including mine and raph's, to gain himself Master status. What happens in Advogato accounts now may or may not be caused by the owner of the account...

KDE

Still trying to compile KDE 3.1 from CVS. I think it wasn't working because my two versions of Qt 3 were conflicting. Hopefully I can get away with running the CVS version of Qt in place of my old (stable) one.

I wish I had a faster connection :-P So much CVS work is leaving my ISDN a little exhausted...

Life

Went to a nature reserve near Barnsley (about an hour's drive away from where I live) which I'd never been to before - Old Moor Wetland Centre. I thought I knew all the good nature reserves within range, but it turns out I was wrong. This one is really excellent; if you happen to live close, and you're interested in that kind of thing, I recommend it. Plus I saw a Spotted Crake (that's a rare bird, for less-informed readers).

[It does have an official website, but it's not particularly useful since it refers to images on someone's C: drive, and the links are all dead :-) ]

21 Sep 2002 (updated 21 Sep 2002 at 19:36 UTC) »

MyAddressBook

MyAddressBook now has a web site here. I didn't have to think much about the design this time - I copied MyAddressBook's own interface that I designed a few months ago. I think it works quite well.

FTPsuite

FTPsuite is a program I wrote some time ago for a supermarket chain (which shall remain nameless!), to distribute a file to each of their 100+ stores automatically by FTP. (It's not been released beyond that company yet, as it's quite specific to that situation at the moment.) Today I went in to make some small changes. My initial test run, however, was quite worrying. The distribution failed for every third store. A few failures were expected - stores that had just closed down, stores that were about to open, etc. - but way too many were failing. But I went ahead anyway, promising to look into that problem afterwards.

The change I went in to make was to speed up failures. I.e. ping the store first with a timeout of 1 second to see if it's up, rather than having to wait for FTP's 30-ish second timeout. So, having made that change, I ran it again. The one-store-in-three problem became even more bizarre: one store in three wasn't responding to pings, even though we knew that the machines at each store were identical, the machines really were all up, and they were communicating fine with the company's EFT server.

It turned out that a router was badly configured - packets were bouncing indefinitely between the routers at either end of one of the three links to BT. This wasn't as obvious as you might think - this supermarket company is only just starting to use IP; most of their data traffic (including that to the EFT server) goes via SNA (an older IBM protocol) over completely different links, which were working fine.

But it still took a bit of persuading that it wasn't my program that had broken :-)

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM - ADVOGATO VIRUS!

Really, REALLY don't visit ttt1's account. It's an advogato virus. It contains an iframe which, for each user who visits it, infects their account with that iframe. So it will spread very rapidly via account pages - and more importantly, this ALSO SPREADS VIA THE PERSON INDEX (i.e. what you get by clicking 'People' at the bottom of the page).

Raph, please delete these accounts ASAP!

Quick note today: I've put out the first release of MyAddressBook, v0.1.0 (alpha). Have fun ;-)

There are many more features in the pipeline, though, so more releases should follow soon.

Random stuff

Not a lot happened today really. I started messing around with fractals again, and made a spectacular mess of the Koch Snowflake Curve. (It was almost right; I tried to make it completely right and it went completely wrong. Such is life.)

LCD screens and DVI cables - update

The problem I mentioned yesterday about the DVI interface only working during bootup if the analogue cable is plugged in as well has now been solved. It turns out to be a known issue with my graphics card, and there was a BIOS update that fixed it on the manufacturer's site. (Without any instructions! Just the binary ROM image, and five words of description. How helpful. It took a large amount of searching to find the utility that would actually upgrade the BIOS using that image...)

So if anyone is stuck with the same problem on the same card (my card is an Inno3D Tornado GeForce 4 Ti 4200) then e-mail me and I'll tell you where to find the utilities you need...

Spam-proofness

Note that in my "e-mail me" link above, the link href is coded as "mailto:m@lcolm.org.uk". That's my new way to conqueror spam... and it's completely transparent in sane browsers (and many insane browsers too). Anyone know whether it will work or not? Anyone got any better ways to transparently spam-proof links?

MyAddressBook

Further hacking on MyAB happened today during lunchtime and "private study" periods at school (well, what else am I supposed to use them for? ;-) ). The demo site is now up, although I've hardly tested it at all, and it will be going up and down rapidly as I sometimes end up editing it live. The good thing is that by hacking the demo site, I'm also fixing the program itself :-) A prerelease tarball should arrive soon.

Gentoo again

aes tells me that Gentoo's Gnome setup is so notoriously bad that it's acceptable to close a Gnome Bugzilla bug if the reporter is using Gentoo and no-one else can reproduce it. This doesn't surprise me.

Anyway, I'm sticking with Gentoo (and KDE!) for now - it has some really good features which offset the Gnome disadvantage. Although aes has also been pestering me to switch to Debian... I'll give it a try sometime :-)

On unrelated Gentoo news, Gentoo 1.4 is almost out, so I'd better get ready to upgrade to its GCC 3.2 based system. I.e. make lots of backups of everything. I'm dreading finding out that lots of important stuff won't compile under GCC 3.2 ......

LCD screens and DVI cables

My DVI cable arrived today, so I can finally switch from the amazingly pointless method of Digital to Analogue to Digital conversion. At least, that's the theory. I don't know whether the problem lies with my graphics card or my LCD monitor (or both?), but many strange things have started happening since I switched to the new signal interface. E.g. I can't see anything during bootup until X loads (the screen complains about an incorrect signal rate) unless I plug the analogue cable in as well - even when the screen is in digital mode. The mere presence of an analogue cable makes the digital interface behave? Who knows.

Also, "mesh" patterns (i.e. alternate pixels light and dark, like Win98 on the shutdown dialog or X when starting) are amazingly flickery. And I've totally trashed WinXP. It will now only start in VGA mode, whichever interface I use, and if I do so much as to change the colour depth, the screen goes blank. (Not that it matters much; I only booted XP to see what would happen! I'll just keep using Linux.) Time to reinstall some drivers...

And NVidia's Linux driver is clever. The way it does software scaling on text mode, so the screen gets sent data at its natural resolution. nvDriver's software scaler is much less fuzzy than the screen's integrated one. nvDriver can also draw a shadow under the mouse pointer. Cool, although I suspect the novelty value will wear off in a couple of minutes.

MyAddressBook

I've decided to release the PHP and MySQL-powered e-mail address book system I'm writing - MyAddressBook - under the GPL. It was initially for my home intranet, but I might as well release it having spent a while making it work properly. I've set up a SourceForge account for it, but before I upload anything I'll have to spend a bit of time un-hardcoding the bits specific to my installation and making the whole lot configurable. Something should appear within the next few days. Watch This Space :-)

Gentoo

I think I'll give up trying to compile KDE 3.1 beta from CVS. Just about the whole of their CVS tree won't compile, due to assorted errors. I'll stick with my buggy but workable 3.1-alpha-ish copy for now.

And why doesn't Gentoo's Evolution package include Pilot sync support? Not fair. That's the only reason I installed it. And I can't install using Ximian Red Carpet because it doesn't know about Gentoo. So I'll have to spend a while downloading the latest Evolution source. (If only I could get a broadband connection... out here I'm stuck with ISDN.)

Unless, of course, anyone can suggest a decent organiser program (with diary, to do, etc.) which will sync with Pilots, but most importantly is compatible with the USB Handspring Visor Edge...

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